When Lady Rose Lancaster — practical, quietly brilliant at the sort of things women are not supposed to be brilliant at, and resigned to a sensible future rather than a passionate one — accepts the Duke of Ashmore’s offer of marriage, she tells herself it is a reasonable arrangement: his title and neglected estate need her modest but reliable dowry; she needs the respectability that will protect her younger sisters. What she does not account for is the man behind the silence.
Daniel Bancroft, the eighth Duke of Ashmore, has not been precisely silent since his wife’s death three years ago — he simply has nothing left to say that the ton would understand. Grief has calcified around him like a second skin, and he has learned that words, once spoken carelessly, cannot be recalled. A practical arrangement with an unsentimental woman suits him entirely. He requires no tenderness and intends to offer none.
But Rose is not unsentimental — she is simply careful. And as the long Derbyshire autumn forces them into each other’s company — shared mornings in the library, walks that stretch past the bounds of decorum, a household watching its new duchess with unconcealed hope — they discover that practicality and feeling are not, as they both believed, opposites. The greatest danger turns out not to be scandal or grief or the whispering ton, but something far more ungovernable: the slow, irresistible thaw of two hearts that had each, in their own way, agreed never to feel anything again.
If you love: brooding dukes who only laugh when they truly mean it • heroines who reorganise your entire worldview along with your bookshelves • forced proximity that slowly, devastatingly works • marriages of convenience that become love stories worth every page
