The Grieving Duke's Governess (Beastly Dukes of the Ton 3)

“A grieving duke who buried the husband she mourned.

A silent little girl no one has reached in two years.

And the penniless war widow brave enough to try.”

Elizabeth Mercer has buried a husband, a fortune she never had, and every soft expectation a woman is permitted to keep.

Widowed by the war and turned away from three respectable houses for the crime of being too useful and too honest, she arrives at Ravensmere with a dead man’s debts behind her and nowhere left in the world to go.

The Duke of Ravensmere is drowning quietly.

Two years after the death of his wife, Gavin Harrow still cannot bring himself to cross the threshold of his own daughter’s nursery, where six-year-old Iris has not spoken a single word since the funeral.

Governess after governess has tried to correct the child into cheerfulness and failed, and the Duke has all but given up hope.

But Elizabeth does not try to mend the little girl. She simply refuses to leave her alone in her silence.

And there is something the Duke has never told her.

Four years ago, on a battlefield in Spain, it was his own hand that wrote the letter that made her a widow.

He buried her husband, and he has carried the weight of it every day since.

Now the one woman he believes he can never deserve is beneath his roof, reaching his daughter, and quietly undoing every wall he built to survive his grief.

As Iris begins to speak again and warmth returns to a house that has been cold for years, the distance between a duke and his governess narrows into something neither of them dares to name.

But a widowed duke does not marry the penniless woman in his schoolroom.

Society forbids it, his late wife’s family is watching, and the cruelest gossip in the county has waited four long years for precisely this scandal.

When the whispers turn vicious, Elizabeth must decide whether to protect the man and the child she has come to love by leaving them forever, or to believe, for the first time in her life, that she is allowed to stay.

A clean Regency romance of grief and healing, second chances, wounded hearts, and the courage to choose love when the whole world says otherwise.

No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a happily ever after that will leave you smiling long after the final page.