“Four governesses had broken under his roof in eight months. Jane Lacey did not intend to be the fifth.”
The Duke of Caldwell can manage a dukedom of forty thousand acres. He cannot manage bedtime.
His cousin’s two orphaned boys have been falling apart under his guardianship for nearly a year. Arthur is five, and barricades himself in pantries. George is nine, and conducts his grief like a war, locked behind a door he refuses to open. Every governess the London agencies have sent has fled in tears.
Then a quiet young woman arrives with one trunk, plain references, and the unsettling habit of catching wooden soldiers thrown at her head without flinching.
She does not coax George out from behind his walls. She gives him a book and tells him she will be there when he is ready. She does not punish Arthur’s chaos. She gives it a channel. Within a single day, Jane Lacey has done what eight months and four failures could not.
The duke who has spent his life keeping people at a distance finds himself watching her from doorways, listening for her step in the corridor, wondering how a stranger has settled the household his own father raised him to command.
What he cannot know is that Jane Lacey is not her real name.
The references are forged. Somewhere in London, a man with damp hands is waiting for her, and the uncle who promised her to him is closing in.
When her past finally finds her, the duke who has never trusted easily will have to decide whether protecting her means letting her go, or never letting her go again.
A slow-burn clean Regency romance with a brooding guardian duke, a governess who is more than she seems, two grieving boys worth saving, and a love that proves the bravest hearts are the ones that learn to stay.
No cheating. No cliffhangers. Only a warm and satisfying happily ever after.
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