She agreed to the marriage. She did not agree to fall in love.
Some scandals last forever. Some — it turns out — are worth every whisper.
Miss Violet Stratton has spent five careful years being the woman her family needed her to be: composed, capable, and relentlessly practical about her own future. She expects a sensible match, a manageable life, and absolutely nothing that would complicate either. She does not expect a wrong turn at a masquerade ball, an unlocked door, and twenty minutes in a firelit room with the most infuriating, broad-shouldered stranger she has ever had the misfortune of finding genuinely interesting.
Charles Waverley, Marquess of Ashford, has rebuilt his ancestral estate from ruin through sheer, grinding determination — and has sworn that sentiment will never cost him what it cost his father. He does not fall. He does not lose. He most certainly does not get caught in private studies at masquerade balls with masked women whose laugh does something entirely unreasonable to his composure.
And yet.
When scandal breaks by morning and honour demands the only remedy available, two strangers find themselves bound by a marriage neither wanted — with a crumbling estate, a younger brother’s debts, and the relentless scrutiny of the ton standing between them and any hope of peace. Their arrangement is simple: clear eyes, no pretension, and absolutely no falling in love.
The problem with clear eyes is that they see everything.
Including, eventually, each other.
One Night with the Marquess is the sparkling, slow-burn Regency romance for readers who stayed for the wit, the longing, and the kind of love that sneaks up on you between the estate accounts and the arguments about Fielding. Packed with razor-sharp repartee, a heroine who runs a household and your heart with equal efficiency, a brooding hero who burns his declarations and writes better ones, and a romance that builds from reluctant respect to something neither of them is remotely prepared for — this is the book you clear your weekend for.
Some scandals last forever. Some are worth every whisper. And some — the best kind — become, quietly and without ceremony, the rest of your life.
