A Concerto for the Niece Who Would Not – Paperback

She will not trade her music for a husband. Especially one whose bank holds the family mortgage.

Miss Juliana Vesey has the finest hands in Ormond Square-and intends to keep them on the pianoforte. For three years, she has secretly earned money from her playing, securing an independence that a respectable marriage could cost her.

So when the Subscription of Nine proposes Mr. Lucian Crane, Juliana refuses before he has finished bowing.

A banker. The son of the rival hostess across the square. A man who might regard her as part of a financial arrangement-and who, she is quite certain, cannot tell Clementi from a kettle.

Then sixty beautifully engraved invitations turn a glittering London summer into a social disaster.

Issued in two rival hostesses’ names, they summon all the wrong guests to a concert one hostess never planned, at a house a royal visitor was never meant to enter. Both salons face humiliation. Neither will yield. And a Grand Duchess’s carriage is due at nine o’clock on Wednesday.

Someone has made a very deliberate muddle. Juliana and Lucian must untangle it before the royal party reaches the wrong door.

Forced to work with the man she dismissed, Juliana discovers that his careful accounts conceal a more attentive nature than she imagined. Lucian understands what the figures reveal. More unsettling still, he seems to understand what her music means to her.

Through fireworks, strawberry ices and a strong room full of old secrets, an unwanted match becomes an unexpected alliance. But Juliana has worked too hard for her freedom to surrender it now.

If Lucian wants her hand, he must understand everything she intends to keep doing with it.

A Concerto for the Niece Who Would Not is Book Five of The Ormond Square Duets: a sparkling Regency romance featuring rival salons, two formidable mothers, a royal concert in the wrong house, and a heroine determined to make her own proposal, on her own terms.

A clean and wholesome romance with a gentle mystery, no explicit content, and a happy ending assured.