My Lady Notorious

My Lady Notorious is a historical romance by Jo Beverley, published in 1993 and the first of her novels about the Malloren family.

Lady Chastity Ware is desperate to help her widowed sister and her baby escape a man who means them harm, and her solution is to dress as a highwayman and take the first coach that comes down the road. The passenger turns out to be Cyn Malloren, an aristocrat recovering from war wounds and thoroughly bored by his convalescence, who finds himself abducted by a young woman in disguise and is delighted by the prospect. He goes along with her plan, which puts them both in danger, and becomes steadily more interested in the bitter secrets that drive her. The novel runs the dangerous journey and the romance alongside each other, with neither one able to proceed without the other.

Beverley wrote a long series of Georgian and Regency romances, and this book establishes the Malloren family, whose other members take their turns in the novels that follow.