A Marchioness for the Beast

“They call him the mad marquess. The new neighbour across the stream calls him by his name.”

Arabella Thorne is twenty-four, a confirmed spinster, and entirely content to be one. She has spent the best years of her youth at her mother’s bedside, and what she wants now is what the world has never quite known what to do with: a country cottage, a sketchbook, and the freedom to spend her afternoons studying the birds along a Derbyshire stream.

She does not expect to find anything else there.

She certainly does not expect the man on horseback who appears on the opposite bank one quiet afternoon, large and dark and visibly haunted, the kind of man the village whispers about and crosses streets to avoid. She knows who he must be. Everyone in Derbyshire knows. The mad marquess of Alendale Manor, returned from the Peninsular War a different man than the one who went, with a leg that no longer works the way it should and nightmares that wake the household.

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