It's a bad omen to find a corpse on the eve of a wedding… unless it was fate's plan all along.

Autumn has arrived in England and so has Mary Tomlinson's long-awaited wedding day to her handsome former Bow Street inspector. Though her newfound happiness frightens her—she's had ill-fortune with men in the past—she's looking forward to what her future will bring, for assisting in solving crimes is quite invigorating, especially when mixing business with heady trysts of pleasure.

After retiring from his position at Whitehall, on the eve of Inspector Gabriel Bright's wedding to the intriguing Mary, he attends the opera with her for no other reason than to treat her to her favorite play. Despite their obstacle-strewn path to romance, he's anticipating wedding—and bedding—the attractive woman and being a husband again as well as making their oftentimes hotly passionate relationship legitimate.

Yet when they stumble over a dead body in a shadowy corridor at the opera house, the course of those plans is thrown into jeopardy, for the dead woman had been a paramour of her former husband's. As tension brews between Mary and Bright, their investigation takes them to Brighton and plunges them into a secret pleasure spa. The distractions prove harrowing and dangerous to them both, and unless they solve the case, there will be nothing left of the relationship to warrant a union.