“Her brother sold her to pay his debts.
The duke who bought her never wanted a wife at all.
Neither of them was prepared to fall in love.”
“Ellen Middleton was not asked. She was offered.”
When her brother gambles the family into ruin, he does the unthinkable to save himself. He walks into a duke’s library and offers the one thing he has left to trade: his sister.
Ellen learns she is to be married the way one learns of a death in the family, quietly, and far too late to change it. She has spent years holding a crumbling household together with her own two hands while no one noticed the weight of it. Now she is to be handed to a cold, exacting stranger who did not court her, does not want her, and married her only because it balanced an account.
Theodore Pillard, the Duke of Rosanne, does not believe in sentiment. He believes in order, in ledgers, in a life arranged so precisely that nothing can ever reach him again. A wife who expects nothing and asks for nothing suits him perfectly. Ellen will have his name, his houses, and his indifference, and she will never trouble him with a heart he has no intention of using.
It is a simple arrangement. Practical and contained.
Until he begins to notice the things she never says. The competence she hides. The quiet courage of a woman who was sold and still walked into his house with her chin level and her eyes steady.
The more time the Duke spends with the wife he never meant to want, the more the careful walls he built around himself begin to give way. And the more Ellen dares to hope that she might be more than a debt someone else arranged to settle.
But a marriage begun as a transaction was never meant to become a love worth risking everything for. And when the truth of that bargain threatens to tear them apart, they must both decide whether a match made from necessity can become a marriage made from choice.
A heartfelt, completely clean marriage of convenience Regency romance of quiet courage, a guarded duke, and a love neither of them bargained for. Book 1 of Brides of Necessity, fully standalone, with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.
No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a happily-ever-after that will leave you smiling long after the final page.
Also available with Kindle Unlimited!
