Lady Beware

A family name dragged through generations of scandal, madness, and rumor is not easily redeemed—and Horatio Cave, the new Viscount Darien, knows it better than anyone. Returning from war with hard-won honor and a quiet determination to reclaim his family's place in society, he sets his sights on the luminous Lady Thea Debenham. What follows is far more complicated than seduction: a charged, dangerous courtship between a woman who senses the man beneath the reputation and a man who isn't sure society will ever let him be anything else.

Beverley's great strength here is psychological texture—she takes the familiar "reformed rake" premise and deepens it considerably, giving both hero and heroine genuine inner lives and competing loyalties. The prose moves between drawing-room tension and real emotional risk without losing its period elegance, and the final entry in the Company of Rogues series carries the satisfying weight of a world fully built. Readers who've followed this series will find a fitting conclusion; newcomers will find an absorbing, smartly written Regency romance that earns its complications.