London, 1814. When Violet Bridgerton announces to a ballroom that her eldest son intends to find a wife, every young lady in London takes notice. Lady Amaryllis Wrenfield takes notes. She is not interested in the Viscount. She is interested in the story — the melancholy spectacle of a man conducting a search for a viscountess with the efficiency of an audit and the hollow courtship of the perfectly agreeable Miss Edwina Sharma that follows. It is, to a woman who has built a quiet literary career on the architecture of the human heart, utterly fascinating material. She does not intend to become part of it. Anthony Bridgerton does not notice her. Then, weeks into a season that has produced nothing but disappointment, he hears her laugh — genuine, unguarded, belonging to a woman who is quite clearly not performing for anyone — and finds, to his considerable irritation, that he cannot place her, cannot forget her, and cannot entirely explain why either of those things bothers him. He will understand, eventually. So will she.