After her mother’s mysterious death, all Phoebe wants is a quiet life as a fashion designer—not marriage. But her uncle threatens legal action to take the cottage and land she’s loved since childhood. In order to prevent him from stealing her inheritance she must find the father she never knew and enter into a marriage of convenience. Soon she journeys with her new husband to South Africa in the days leading up to a Boer war, struggling to a past and a future amid assassination attempts, betrayal, murder, and a growing attraction to her in-name-only husband in turn-of-the-century England.