PART 1 The first time Thomas, the Duke of Everly, saw the woman he had once refused to marry, she was standing in the rain on the steps of a house that did not belong to him, wearing a servant’s gown that had been mended at the hem, and holding a child against her hip….
PART 1 The air in the Danbury assembly rooms tasted of sour wine, wilting lilies, and desperate ambition. It was suffocating. Lydia stood flush against the pale green silk of the wall, nursing a lukewarm glass of lemonade. The crystal dug into her gloved palm. She was twenty-four, considered entirely past her prime, and perfectly…
PART 1 “Give me an heir and you’ll be free.” The Duke of Edshot said it the way another man might read out a bill of sale—without heat, without apology. His back half turned to the woman who stood on the far side of the great drawing room. The fire had burned low, and no…
PART 1 The Duke of Dunbear had not meant to see it. He had come round by the low gate, the way he always came when he didn’t want to be announced, and so it was that Rouse of Dunbear — thirty-eight years old, a widower twice over in the ways that mattered, a man…
PART 1 The news spread through England’s grandest drawing rooms faster than the morning papers. His grace, Duke Frederick Winthorp, guardian of one of the oldest ducal houses in the kingdom, was to marry Lady Josephine Hartwell, the only daughter of the immensely wealthy Earl of Hartwell. The announcement sent the aristocracy into a frenzy….
PART 1 The carriage wheels stopped, and Evelyn Ashworth felt her heart stop with them. She had been married for exactly six hours. She had not spoken more than ten words to her husband. The Duke of Thornwood sat across from her in the carriage, staring out the window as if she did not exist….
Chapter 1 He held the agency’s letter over the stove flame until the paper began to curl and blacken, then snatched it back — because a man who has buried a wife knows the difference between wanting a thing and being allowed to want it. Eleven minutes he stood like that, a kitchen going cold…
Chapter 1 The clink of champagne flutes drifted up the stairwell, and Amelia pressed her palm flat against the cold brass rail so her knees would not give out. Three nights of her husband’s “seasickness pills” had turned her legs into wet rope. Through the gap in the mahogany balustrade, Bennett’s voice floated up —…
Chapter 1 The snow came down the night I stopped believing in coincidences. I came home from a double shift with a birthday cake for my partner — Ranger, my German Shepherd, seven years of tracking beside me — and found him standing in the middle of the living room, ears locked forward, refusing to…
Chapter 1 The snow came down the night I stopped believing in coincidences. I came home from a double shift with a birthday cake for my partner — Ranger, my German Shepherd, seven years of tracking beside me — and found him standing in the middle of the living room, ears locked forward, refusing to…
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