A Wicked Duke in the Wrong Carriage – Paperback

Gloucestershire, March 1817. Lydia Ashford is twenty-two, rich, and due at the church at eleven to marry a baronet who has never asked her a real question. At six that morning she overhears her guardian and her bridegroom arranging a doctor’s certificate, a quiet house in Wales and a bride nobody will ever ask for again.

She takes her father’s letters and leaves by the first carriage on the road.

It belongs to Alexander Vale, Duke of Ravencourt, the last man in England who wants a runaway bride in his coach. He has a castle on a cliff, a dead brother, eight years of sleepless nights and a reputation that makes mothers cross the street. He also has a list of names a courier was about to hand him, and a feeling that the girl with the bundle of letters has walked into the middle of it.

Between the Devon coast and London lie hired men, coded ledgers and a mastermind who has spent a decade making sure nobody looks his way. Lydia has the evidence. Alexander has the pistols. Neither of them has any plan for the way he looks at her across a ledger table, or for what happens on the battlements when the wind drops.

A brooding duke, an innocent heiress and a villain who wants them both quiet. Book 1 of Hearts in Peril.