A Fiery Widow for the Cold Duke

Fourteen months of widowhood have left Anastasia Reddington with two rented rooms, a ledger that refuses to balance, and a temper she has swallowed so often it sits in her like a coal that will not go out. When a position at Wrenwick Hall is offered at twice the going rate, she takes it, and she does not ask why nobody else would.

Alexander, Duke of Wrenwick, has emptied his own house. Servants flinch. Footmen leave. The table is laid every morning for a man who never eats at it. He expects the new housekeeper to last a week.

She lasts three days before telling him, to his face, that fear is the most expensive economy he has ever practised.

What begins as a trial becomes an arrangement, and the arrangement becomes a marriage neither of them planned to want. Then a charming young clergyman takes an interest in the new duchess, an old secret surfaces that someone has been saving for years, and Anastasia discovers how much of her husband's coldness was only ever armour.

A clean, closed-door Regency romance with a grumpy duke, a widow who has finally run out of saying nothing, and a hard-won happily ever after.