Devil in Winter

Devil in Winter is a historical romance by the American writer Lisa Kleypas, published in 2006. It is the third of her Wallflowers novels, and it is set in England in the nineteenth century.

Evangeline Jenner is painfully shy and has spent years being overlooked, and she also has a fortune coming to her that her relatives are determined to get their hands on first. Her way out is to propose a marriage to Sebastian, Viscount St. Vincent, whose reputation is exactly the opposite of hers: he is a rake with gambling debts who has never had to consider anybody's comfort but his own. Kleypas writes the book around the bargain the two of them make and what follows it, which includes a journey north, a household full of people with opinions, and the slow process by which two people who married for practical reasons find out what the other is actually like. The arrangement gives each of them something the other needs, and the novel is concerned with how much of the marriage is still a transaction and when it stops being one.

The Wallflowers books follow a group of friends through their seasons, and each novel puts one of them at the centre while the rest of the group continues in the background.