Wicked Promise

Wicked Promise is a historical romance by Kat Martin, published by St. Martin's Paperbacks in 1998 and the first of her Clayton novels.

Elizabeth Woolcot is being pushed into a marriage with a neighbour she finds loathsome, and the only person she can appeal to for help is her guardian, Nicholas Warring, Earl of Ravenworth. Nicholas is called the Wicked Earl for reasons that are not entirely unfair: he was convicted of murder and barely escaped the gallows, and his reputation discourages sensible people from having anything to do with him. Elizabeth arrives expecting a protector and finds a man whose face and manner are impossible to dismiss. Her difficulty is that he is married, estranged from his wife for years but not free, so whatever develops between them has no respectable outcome. Then a serious crime is committed, Nicholas is the obvious suspect, and Elizabeth has to decide how far she believes in a man whom everybody else has already tried and condemned.

Martin writes historical romance with a mystery running underneath it, and the plot gives her heroine a reason to defend the one man she is not allowed to want.