On the cusp of her first London season, painfully shy Madeline Gracechurch does the unthinkable: she invents a Scottish sweetheart. Her fictional Captain gives her cover from the marriage mart and a reason to stay home with her butterflies and sketchbooks. And when the fiction grows inconvenient, she simply writes him killed in battle. Problem solved. Or so she believes.
Years later, the very real Captain Logan MacKenzie turns up on Maddie's doorstep — alive, gruff, and holding a stack of the love letters she never meant anyone to read. Wounded in body and spirit, Logan needs the respectability a wife can offer to secure a home for the men who served under him. Maddie's invented promises are suddenly a debt he intends to collect, as a marriage of convenience that neither of them expects to feel quite so real.
The third book in Tessa Dare's Castles Ever After series is a warm, witty Highland romance about the stories we tell to protect ourselves and the people who see through them. Set against a crumbling Scottish castle and a ragtag band of veterans, it pairs a bookish introvert with a battle-scarred soldier for a slow thaw from pretense to genuine devotion.