The Cruel Duke’s Practical Duchess

Description

For eight long years, Josephine has been a governess, raising other people’s children, wearing the grey dress that lets the world look right through her. She has trained herself to want nothing she cannot earn, and to ask for nothing at all.

Then, across a windy churchyard one Sunday morning, the Duke of Blackmere meets her eyes and does not look away.

Jack Harrod is the most hated man in the county. The papers say he tore down a village out of cruelty. The drawing rooms say worse. He has never once defended himself, because the truth he carries is too heavy to hand to strangers. He has lived alone for so long that he has forgotten what it feels like to be looked at without fear, and a governess in a grey dress, who looks back at him as though he were simply a man, undoes something in him he thought was permanently fixed.

When a quiet country vicar suggests the unthinkable, Josephine finds herself agreeing to a marriage that was never meant to be more than practical. Separate wings. Mutual respect. An heir, in time. And yet, evening by evening, in the library of a cold Northumberland hall, two people who had each given up on being known begin to know each other.

But the Duke has a cousin who has spent his whole life waiting to inherit, and who will spread any rumour and ruin any reputation to take what he believes is his. If Josephine wants to keep the first home she has ever truly belonged in, she will have to step out of the shadows she has lived in for years and let the whole county finally see her.