An Inconvenient Wife — Megan Chance

You're too sensitive, Lucy. You need to know your place. Be a wife to your husband. Find your duty. Happiness will follow. For young Mrs. Lucy Carleton, it's becoming harder and harder to be the perfect wife, to feign pleasure at the elegant soirees and glittering balls, the elaborate gowns and endless gossip. While other women revel in the rigors of the Season, she feels overwrought and increasingly suffocated...until her only escape is the blessed darkness laudanum brings.

Her husband, William, is deeply concerned. He has taken his beautiful, fragile wife to doctor after doctor, hoping to find someone who can cure her of her headaches and fits of hysteria, with no success. But now a brilliant and controversial new healer has arrived in New York City. Victor Seth is a doctor of neurology. He is also a hypnotist, maybe a charlatan.

At first, Lucy is reluctant to see him. There is something about the way he looks at her, something improper and slightly dangerous in his gaze that makes her afraid of him, afraid of the secrets he might uncover. And yet, Victor Seth holds out the promise of salvation. Or does he? For the compelling doctor has his own agenda. In the fascinating Mrs. Carleton, he perceives an opportunity he cannot resist, and soon his actions will set off a chain of events that will have shocking repercussions no one can foresee, Lucy least of all.