When Miss Arabella Winslow’s father gambles away what little remained of the Winslow name, she expects to be sold like a bolt of unfashionable cloth — bundled off to whatever creditor will take her. She does not expect Nicholas Everington, the Duke of Ravenswood: cold, commanding, and possessed of an unfathomable willingness to clear every last debt in exchange for her hand.
Their arrangement is simple on paper. The marriage will be conducted without sentiment. Arabella vows to be dutiful and quietly useful. Nicholas vows to remain unmoved.
But Regency households are small, and vows made in lawyers’ offices have a habit of unraveling in drawing rooms. As Nicholas discovers the keen intelligence, ferocious loyalty, and hidden literary ambition beneath Arabella’s composed exterior — and Arabella glimpses the burden of a very specific loneliness beneath the Duke’s formidable mask — the contract between them begins to rewrite itself in something far warmer, and far more dangerous, than ink.
She expected a transaction. He expected compliance. Neither expected to fall. And neither quite knows, when it happens, how to ask for what they now desperately want.
