Never Wager With A Wallflower

The third and final delightful installment in the Merriwell Sister's Regency rom-com series.

Venus Merriwell has loathed and despised Galahad Sinclair since the moment she flattened him in her brother-in-law's shrubbery four years ago. Then, she was convinced he was the worst sort of scoundrel, and he has done little to convince her otherwise in all the time since. He's a feckless gambler, exactly like the useless father who blithely abandoned the three Merriwell sisters to a life of poverty, who wastes all his time trying to con money out of his hapless customers in his shady gaming den in the docks. Galahad has always only cared about lining his own pockets, whereas Vee has always been more concerned with the plight of others. To that end, she dedicates almost every waking hour to the Covent Garden Asylum for Orphans where she teaches other abandoned children their letters while trying to come up with ways to make enough money to keep food on the table and mend the orphanage's leaky roof. Not only is her second home and life's vocation falling apart, but it is also bursting at the seams, so they urgently need to expand their premises into the building next door. A building that has been bequeathed to the asylum in their benefactor Mrs Leyton-Brown's will.

Galahad Sinclair is a man on a mission. A mission to rebuild the empire which should have been his before fate intervened and left him alone and destitute on the mean streets of New York. He has made huge inroads towards complete financial security in his newly adopted home in London, far away from all those bad memories, and has finally saved enough money to build the pleasure palace that he had always dreamed of as a boy. When he hears a rumour that the up-to-his-eyeballs-in-debt Lord Mallory has recently inherited some property that he is in a hurry to offload, Gal wastes no time in snapping it up. The three identical townhouses all sandwiched together in vibrant Covent Garden were not only a steal-they couldn't have been a more lucrative location if they tried. Everything about them is perfect. The only big, fat, fly in the ointment, is that the building he has invested everything in sits right next door to the pernickety and disapproving Miss Venus Merriwell. A total harridan he has done his level best to avoid since the first moment she flew right at him screaming blue murder before she floored him and almost carried that murder out. Avoidance is no mean feat when she is the sister-in-law of his cousin Giles, the only living family member that Gal has left. Not only does the bespeckled, morally superior and infuriating bane of his life vociferously disapprove of him opening his 'den of inequity' right on her doorstep, she has it in her much-too-pretty but maddening head that his building should have been hers and wants him to it back.

While Vee and Gal lock horns over practically everything, and while her malevolent orphans do their darndest to sabotage his lifelong dream, can either of them take the ultimate gamble-and learn to love thy neighbour?