When Philip Alistair, the formidably aloof Duke of Ashvale, learns that his grandmother’s estate will pass entirely out of Alistair hands unless he weds before his thirty-third birthday, he approaches the matter with the same cool efficiency he brings to everything: he draws up a list of requirements, instructs his solicitor, and expects the matter resolved by Michaelmas. What he does not expect is Celeste Briarwood.
Celeste, the eldest of three dowerless sisters, has endured two Seasons with a bright smile and a quietly breaking heart, watching suitors evaporate the moment they learn her father’s debts run deeper than his wine cellar. When a mutual acquaintance brokers a proposition—a marriage of pure convenience, a ducal title in exchange for companionship and heirs—Celeste accepts, telling herself it is strategy, not desperation. She will be pleasant, efficient, and utterly unaffected by a husband who seems constitutionally opposed to warmth.
But Ashvale Park has a way of stripping pretence from everyone who enters it. Forced together by rain-sodden roads, candle-lit evenings, and the slow, unexpected revelation of wounds neither has dared to show the world, Philip and Celeste discover that the most inconvenient feeling in England is the one growing steadily between them. He begins to thaw. She begins to hope. And both must decide whether a contract of convenience can be rewritten—by the heart.
A Bride for the Grumpy Duke is a standalone steamy Regency romance featuring a marriage of convenience, forced proximity, opposites attract, and a slow burn love story set against the backdrop of Regency England’s most beautiful — and most stubbornly overgrown — walled garden.
