The Ruined Lady He Never Expected: A Historical Regency Romance
By Martha Barwood
“She was ruined the moment his brother failed to appear. He was the only man in the chapel willing to stand.”
Helena Fairford let herself believe her luck had turned when Lord Sylvester Birchwood, charming and golden and a duke's own brother, chose her. Then she stood at the altar in her mother's made-over gown and understood that it had not.
He never came.
In a single morning Helena loses everything a woman of no fortune has left to lose: her name, her future, her sister's chances, her...
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“She was ruined the moment his brother failed to appear. He was the only man in the chapel willing to stand.”
Helena Fairford let herself believe her luck had turned when Lord Sylvester Birchwood, charming and golden and a duke's own brother, chose her. Then she stood at the altar in her mother's made-over gown and understood that it had not.
He never came.
In a single morning Helena loses everything a woman of no fortune has left to lose: her name, her future, her sister's chances, her mother's peace. By nightfall she is the only scandal the county cares to speak of.
Then the coldest man in three counties walks into the chapel.
Rhysand, the Duke of Pecking, is everything his brother is not. Hard, honest, and so long resigned to being called a block of ice that he has stopped bothering to thaw. He owes Helena nothing. He crosses that chapel anyway, sets her beneath his name and his protection while the whispers are still forming, and hands the county a story it will not dare despise: that a duke has claimed the bride his brother threw away.
It is meant to be a shield. A cold arrangement, separate lives, no tender lie between them.
But the man who married her to save her name did not expect her to be brave, and clever, and unafraid of him. And Helena, who swore at that altar never to trust a smiling man again, does not know what to do with a husband who never smiles, keeps every promise he makes, and cannot say the one thing she is terrified she has come to want to hear.
The scandal that bound them is already fading. The far more dangerous question is what will be left when it does.
No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a happily ever after that will leave you smiling long after the final page.
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