The Capable Bride's Terms for a Ruined Duke

Piers Chaloner, Duke of Havering, has been turned away by three houses in two years and still needs forty thousand pounds; the roof at Ferrers Abbey is failing, the east wing is shut, and his father’s debt contains a name no one will speak aloud.

Miss Cecily Frayne has kept her father’s books since the age of seventeen, seen eighteen thousand pounds vanish in nine years, and refuses to live again where money quietly disappears.

She comes to Wiltshire bringing what he needs, together with conditions already written: public settlement of the debt and the estate accounts in her name for three years.

Their marriage of convenience proceeds on those terms, yet he offers ready thanks in a cold house and keeps the truth to himself.

A bond neither of them created, signed in 1806 by a man the whole county remembers as charming, then appears, and within twelve days Piers must either leave it buried in a Salisbury registry or produce it openly and let his father’s name fall so his own can remain clean—while his wife has already

stopped addressing him by his Christian name.