CAN LEONORA FOLLOW HER HEART WHILE STILL DOING HER DUTY?

After training with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Leonora Malham Brown sets off to Europe with her new friend Victoria, determined to do what she can to help soldiers wounded at the frontline.

The battlefield is a difficult place for a woman, so Leo cuts her hair short and swaps her skirt for breeches. But concealing her true identity becomes more difficult when she meets the dashing Colonel Alexander Malkovic. Torn between keeping her secret and her growing attraction to a man who disapproves of women at the frontline, she must choose between her duty and her heart.

As Leo crossed to the stairs she heard her grandmother’s voice from the drawing room.

‘Marriage? Oh dear, I’m afraid there’s very little prospect of that. The girl is too tall, too clever and too arrogant.’

Leo had no doubt that she was the girl in question. Up in her bedroom she interrogated her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Wide amber eyes flecked with green looked back at her. There was a trace of moisture on the lashes, which she hastily brushed away. She had resolved long ago that she would not let her grandmother make her cry. She had been fifteen when her father sent her back to live with the old lady and she had sensed at once that she disapproved of her. She guessed that her father had been a disappointment because, instead of staying at home and going into business to increase the family fortune, he had squandered it on an inexplicable, to his mother, passion for archaeology. Then he had compounded his sins by marrying a foreigner, a Greek woman without any social credentials. As a final dereliction of duty, when his wife died he had kept Leo with him instead of sending her back to be educated in England like her brother, Ralph, with the result that when she finally arrived at Sussex Gardens she was, in her grandmother’s words, a hoyden with no idea of how to behave in good society.