House of Cads

Marie-Anne de Vauteuil, a Frenchwoman with a questionable upbringing, lost her fiancé years ago and was shunned by genteel society as a penniless, fallen woman. She now lives in an isolated village where nobody cares about her past. There she answers to no one and eats cake until her corset strings strain, if she likes.

An invitation arrives from the family that cast her out. It asks her to come to London on a mission of mercy, and it puts her back in society, close to a man who promises nothing but trouble.

That man is Mason, who passes himself off as a wealthy American businessman. He is neither rich nor in business. He has ended up accidentally engaged and badly wants out. In London he gathers material for the gossip pamphlets he illustrates, a scheme to earn as much as he can before he is found out and leaves town.

Marie-Anne's carefree outlook on life, and on sex, makes Mason look again at his life as a fraud and at his real talent as an artist. This is a historical romance with a comic streak. Whether a man living on lies can win a wife who refuses to be proper is the question it turns on.