Ruffled Feathers by Anna Markland

Dominic Hawke is a proud member of a well-respected family of London goldsmiths who’ve honed their craft for four generations. Like many goldsmiths, they also carry on a lucrative and trusted banking business.

Spain plots to invade England, assassinate her queen and install the Catholic Mary of Scotland on the throne. Determined to protect his country from Spanish interference, Dominic is also an informant for Elizabeth Tudor’s Spymaster.

When the Pope’s Venetian emissary deposits the funds to finance a Spanish invasion with the Hawkes, events are set in motion that will likely result in the Venetian’s execution.

Things go awry when Dominic meets and falls in love with the emissary’s daughter. A man smugly proud of his prodigious sexual appetite and imbued with an innate desire to dominate in the bedroom, he doubts the haughty and spoiled Luisa Bertolli would ever bend to his will. Even if she isn’t involved in her father’s plot, the innocent often do not escape torture and execution.

Unaware of her father’s involvement in treasonous activities, Luisa cannot understand her craving for a London goldsmith who lives in a cramped apartment above his shop. Venetian noblewomen are destined to marry wealthy Venetian men. She begins to suspect Dominic is somehow involved in her father’s affairs and doesn’t doubt that he craves sexual dominance—something she could never agree to. It becomes clear the goldsmith is using her to entrap her father.

Both their lives are at risk in the deadly game of intrigue orchestrated by the Queen’s notorious Spymaster, Francis Walsingham.