A Jilted Bride for the Battle-Scarred Duke

Ariana Raye is a vicar's daughter with her father's debts hanging round her neck, and when Lionel Lockhart withdraws from their engagement in the middle of a ball, what rises in her once the shock clears is a clean and unladylike fury. A ruined woman takes what work she can get, which is how she comes to be rattling toward Penwythe in a hired coach while the driver explains that nobody has been past those gates in four years.

Ronan Kingsford, sixth Duke of Penwythe, came back from the war with a hand that will not close, a face he refuses to look at, and four rules that keep him upright. Rise at five. Dress without help. Do not leave the east wing. Do not look in mirrors.

The rules were working perfectly well until a voice started carrying through the plaster.

Hired as companion to the duke's young sister, Ariana has no intention of being anybody's cure. She simply declines to pretend the man does not exist. What grows between them is slow, reluctant and thoroughly inconvenient, and it is very nearly enough, right until the man who jilted her walks back through the door with a use for her after all.

A clean, closed-door Regency romance with a scarred recluse, a heroine who refuses to be made small, and a happily ever after earned the hard way.