Synopsis: An Innocent Artifice

Nova Scotia-born Philippa Briscoe, wealthy enough always to be respectable, having found no man she believes she can love in Halifax, has cheerfully accepted a life of solitude by the sea, surrounded by her beloved woods. Everything changes when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with two new arrivals--London heiress Christiana Amberley and penniless vicar's daughter Margaret Stedmond.
Trusting in her own experience as a judge of character, Philippa purposes to spend her last season out helping her new friends find suitable matches. But Christiana quickly captures the attentions of he whom Philippa considers the most unsuitable gentleman worthy of the name in Halifax. Margaret, under the ever-encroaching pressures of family and money, lacks the willpower to resist the attentions of a highly eligible man with a deadly secret.
Despite her determination to rescue her friends from themselves (or their suitors, depending on one's perspective), Philippa finds a heart very much like her own in Sebastian Wyndham, though she is certain her parents will disapprove. As she comes to realize that a happy ending may not be the one in which everything plays out according to her designs and contrivances, she must also learn what she thought she already knew--that people are not always what they seem.