The Cost Of A Good Name (The Vandemere Line, #1)

She can close a fortune to the last dollar. She just cannot put her name on any of it. In Gilded Age New York the Vandemeres have the loudest new fortune in the city and none of the old respectability money cannot buy.

Behind the marble walls of Marrenhall, Isabeau Vandemere is the sharpest head at the family shipping-and-steel firm, and the one person forbidden to run it, because a daughter is not meant to work. She is meant to be married into a name.

Her mother has already chosen it, an old title with a thin purse, a match that will buy the family everything and cost Isabeau the only life she ever wanted. Then Julian Casque comes through the tradesman's door.

A dockhand's son turned auction-house appraiser, hired to quietly sell down the founder's vulgar art hoard before the season, he is the first man to look at Isabeau and see the mind instead of the fortune.

Working the collection side by side, two honest eyes in a world built on show, they begin to recognize in each other the one thing neither was ever offered. To be truly seen. But a rival old family, an arranged match, and a season already planned to the day stand between them, and choosing him means forfeiting the very name her family staked on her.

In a marriage market where everything has a price, some things were never meant to be sold.