The Banished Duke (The Notorious Dukes #4)

"Everything needs space to grow. Even people."

They hanged the Duke of Beaumont for a treason he never committed, and sent his twelve-year-old son into the army in the hope that the battlefield would finish what the gallows had begun.

It did not. Twenty-three years later, Benjamin Russell comes home to the one thing the Crown never took from him — a crumbling house at the edge of a village that has spent a generation pretending it is not there.

Amelia Whitfield, daughter of the local Baron, has watched that house from her window her whole life. She has also spent her whole life being told that a woman with soil under her nails and salves in her basket is an embarrassment to her father’s name.

He came to her village to rebuild, and started where any soldier would start — by clearing the ground. Nobody had ever taught him what was worth leaving on it. She was the one who saw what he had nearly destroyed.

He found her on her knees in the wreckage of a rose walk, entirely unconcerned about whose land she was standing on, and she offered him terms: she would help him and teach him what was worth saving, and he would not put a blade to another inch of it without asking her first.

The more they meet in secret, hidden within his ruined garden, the more they discover that something can bloom even in ruined ground. But the man who destroyed his family is still alive, still powerful, and has begun to ask who is living at the traitor’s abandoned house.

A rose, however beautiful, however romantic, is never without its thorns. Reach for one carelessly — and you will bleed...