Eloise Kelly longs for the romance of years gone by; for a dashing hero like The Scarlet Pimpernel to come and sweep her off her Jimmy Choo-clad feet.but instead she's sloshing around London in the rain and finally realising that romantic heroes are a thing of the past.To distract herself from such thoughts, Eloise concentrates on her History dissertation, and it's while rummaging through a pile of old letters and diaries that she discovers something amazing, something that historians have missed: the secret history of the most elusive spy of all time, The Pink Carnation. But why is the very modern Colin Selwick so determined to interfere with Eloise's research? And why does he have to be quite so charming.?

A native of New York City, Lauren Willig has been writing romances ever since she got her hands on her first romance novel at the age of six. Like Eloise Kelly, Lauren is the proud possessor of an unfinished Harvard History department dissertation, and spent a year poring over old documents at the British Library before abandoning the academic life for the more lucrative world of law. Once Lauren received her JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, she practised as a litigation associate at a large New York firm but decided that book deadlines and doc review didn't mix and departed the law for a new adventure in full-time writerdom.