The Cold Duke's Hired Bride

Name: The Cold Duke's Hired Bride
Author: Dorothy Sheldon

51 pages

“She needed a roof no man could put her out from under. He needed a wife to save an estate from ruin. Neither of them expected love.”

Lady Renae Whitmore was born to a fine name and left with nothing to dress it in. When her father died, she learned that an earl could leave his daughter a courtesy title and not a single shilling, and so she married the only man who wanted the name badly enough to overlook the empty purse. It kept her fed, if it never once kept her warm. Now widowed and quietly cheated of her portion by a grasping cousin, Renae has stopped expecting kindness from the world. She takes the one post left to a gentlewoman with clever hands and no money, housekeeper to a great cold house she has seen only the shabbiest rooms of.

The house belongs to Declan, who has inherited a dukedom and a mountain of his late father’s debts in the same breath. The fortune that might save the estate sits locked behind a clause designed to drive reluctant men to the altar, and it will not be released until the new Duke takes a wife. The county holds him cold and hard and past all feeling, and he has never troubled to correct them. What he needs is a wife who wants the arrangement and not the man, one who will ask nothing of him he cannot give.

He did not expect the composed, plain-spoken widow keeping his ledgers to be the most capable woman he has ever met, nor the one person in the house who sees straight through him.

What begins as the most sensible of bargains, his name and his protection for her competence and her discretion, slowly becomes something neither of them planned. As Renae coaxes a dead house back to life and Declan learns to trust a woman who expects nothing of him, the cold walls they have each built to survive begin quietly to give way. But an arrangement made from necessity was never meant to become a marriage worth risking everything for, and the cousin Renae fled has not finished with her yet.

Two people the world had already given up on, and the love that proved it wrong. A heartfelt, completely clean marriage of convenience Regency romance. Book 3 of Sensible Marriages, a standalone story with a guaranteed happily ever after.

No cheating. No cliffhangers. Just a deeply satisfying happily ever after.

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