Nicola always gets what she wants.

Nicola Sparks, sixteen and an orphan, is ready to dive headlong into her first glittering London society season. She's also ready to dive headlong into the arms of handsome and debonair Lord Sebastian Bartholomew. Nicola's dream is a proposal from the viscount -- a dream she's about to realize at last! So naturally, Nathaniel Sheridan's insinuations about her fiancé's flawed character annoy her mightily.

But when Nicola's natural curiosity gets the best of her, she begins to piece together a few things for herself. To her great surprise, Nicola realizes she's had the wrong viscount all along…but is it too late to make things right?

London, 1810...

"Oh, Nicky." The Honorable Miss Eleanor Sheridan sighed. "I would give anything to be an orphan, like you. You are so lucky."

Miss Nicola Sparks, far from taking offense at her friend's remark, looked thoughtfully at her own reflection in the great gilt-framed mirror before them.

"Aren't I, though?" she agreed.

Eleanor's mother let out an indignant harrumph. "Well, I like that!" the Lady Sheridan said as she handed a pile of Eleanor's undergarments to the girl's French maid to pack. "I'm terribly sorry your father and I have been so unobliging, Eleanor, in not perishing in a more timely manner."

Eleanor, who stood behind Nicola at the dressing table, examining her chestnut brown curls in the mirror with the same critical eye Nicola was applying to her glossy black ones, rolled her eyes.

"Oh, don't be tiresome, Mama," Eleanor said. "You know I don't wish you and Papa dead. It's only that lucky Nicola gets to pick from a horde of invitations where she'll go now that school's finished, while I have no choice in the matter at all. I've got to spend the rest of my life -- until I'm married, in any case -- with you and Papa and wretched Nat and Phil."

"I can arrange for you to spend the rest of your life with your great-aunts in Surrey," Lady Sheridan pointed out dryly, "if our household is so offensive to you. I am sure they would love to have you."

Eleanor's hazel eyes widened, and she spun from the dressing table to face her mother. "Surrey!" she burst out. "What in heaven's name would I do in Surrey?"

"I'm sure I can't say." Lady Sheridan closed the first of her daughter's many trunks, then moved to the second. "But I can promise you'll find out if you don't start showing a little more sense. Nicola, lucky to be an orphan, indeed!"

Nicola, roused by this remark from an examination of her new, upswept coiffure -- the first she'd ever been allowed by Martine, her own very strict French maid, who did not believe it was proper for girls younger than sixteen to wear their hair up -- turned around on the tasseled stool upon which she sat, and said to her friend's mother with some gravity, "But I am lucky, Lady Sheridan. I mean, it isn't as if I ever actually knew my parents, so you see, I cannot miss them. They died a few months after I was born. And though their deaths were tragic, at least they perished together. . . ."

"So romantic," Eleanor said with a sigh.

"I hope that when I die, it is like Nicky's parents did, drowning in the river Arno after a sudden storm."

"And though Father hadn't any money to speak of," Nicola went on calmly, as if Eleanor hadn't spoken, "he did leave me the abbey, which provides me with some income -- not much, of course, but enough for a maid and school and new lace for a bonnet now and then, anyway."

Nicola turned back toward her reflection, which, though by no means the prettiest one at Madame Vieuxvincent's Seminary for Young Ladies -- Eleanor surely had the distinction of being the most beautiful girl at school -- no one, with the exception perhaps of Nicola herself, would dispute was anything but pleasing. Nicola found the fact that her nose bore traces of a powdering of freckles, left over from an injudicious river expedition the summer before with neither hat nor parasol, a dreadful shortcoming.

Still, freckles notwithstanding, she was forced to admit, "So really, Lady Sheridan, Eleanor is right. I am lucky. At least I have been, up until now. What shall happen to me next . . ." Nicola bit her lower lip, and watched in the mirror as it turned a deep scarlet.

Meg Cabot is the author of the best-selling, critically acclaimed Princess Diaries books, the first of which was made into the wildly popular Disney movie of the same name. Her other books for teens include All-American Girl, Haunted, Nicola and the Viscount, and Victoria and the Rogue. When not writing novels, Meg keeps busy brushing up on her etiquette, so that when her real parents, the king and queen, come along and restore her to her rightful throne, she won’t make any social gaffes. She lives in New York City with her royal consort and a one-eyed cat named Henrietta.