A Shocking Barter

Clarissa is a young woman of unearthly beauty -- and unfortunate parentage. Ostracized by the family of her deceased nobleman father, the refined innocent is left to the devices of her estranged mother, an infamous harlot known as La Gianetta. Even worse, the unscrupulous -- and hardly maternal -- La Gianetta owes a large debt to a powerful, wealthy womanizer. And she can think of only one possession the demanding gentleman might find of satisfactory value.

Handsome Trevor Whitlatch is quite content that his lovely new acquisition is in every way her mother's daughter -- despite the girl's oddly respectable persona. But a tangle with a hat pin and a most peculiar sojourn in the country are about to teach him that the apple can fall quite far from the tree. And when Clarissa discovers there's more to a man than her teachers at the Bathurst Ladies' Academy let on, everyone's fair game...