Henrietta Jones: Lady Alfred (Henrietta Jones #3)

The year is 1913. Lady Henrietta Jones or ‘Harry’ is wild, confused and out of control. She desperately wants to learn to fly, but the only man available is dark flawed and scowling, an old fashioned brute.

Hostility rapidly turns into a frenzied battle of the sexes.

He reacts with fury to this modern girl who lies through her teeth. She treats him with contempt because he has victorian views on women’s right to vote, and a despicable way of moving his hips.

Harry is a high achieving woman who disguises herself by adopting different roles. She drives a sports automobile and plans to become a suffragette, before flying one of these new wood and canvas flying machines.

When she rescues annoying aircraft maker Lord Jack Hackett from potential death, they flame with emotion, and provoke the other to madness with outrageous lies.

After she maliciously steals his plans to his experimental flying machine, he is forced to chase the dreadful girl across Europe to get them back.

Suffering guilt, she secretly invests in his company. She wants him to believe in the potential of women, and wins a bet tricking him into attending a suffragette meeting. She even wonders mischievously whether she could turn him into a suffragist. But then everything starts to go wrong.

They uncover a plot involving aircraft being sabotaged and pilots killed. The head of the conspiracy is an unknown woman without a conscience, and with unerring male instinct, Jack decides it must be Harry.

Following an accident when she is nearly killed, she goes into hiding to protect the stubborn idiot, and transforms into the dangerous and scheming male Lieutenant... Alfred Pugh-Jones ...Lady Alfred.

Jack surprisingly, appears broken by Harry’s treachery and reported death, and turns to the beautiful but devious Odette Therese von Paradis.

Events become impossibly tangled. Odette and Harry concoct fantastic schemes to destroy each other. More aeroplanes crash though sabotage. An essential flying machine competition is collapsing, and pilots keep getting killed. Meanwhile Britain is heading helplessly towards war without a modern aeroplane.

Harry in her disguise as the young male army officer rises to the challenge, and decides to sort out the whole awful mess. She browbeats potential prime minister Lloyd George into providing help, bullies the best designers in England into creating a world beating aircraft, and still has time to help a ridiculous flawed man.

Two stubborn individuals are caught helplessly in an emotional firestorm. Both will need to compromise, face their own failings and acknowledge a deeper truth, but they will probably be killed before then...