The Cruel Duke’s Practical Duchess

“No one had truly looked at Josephine Woode in years, and the man who finally did was the one they all called cruel.”

For eight long years, Josephine has been a governess, raising other people’s children, wearing the grey dress that lets the world look right through her. She has trained herself to want nothing she cannot earn, and to ask for nothing at all.

Then, across a windy churchyard one Sunday morning, the Duke of Blackmere meets her eyes and does not look away.

Jack Harrod is the most hated man in the county. The papers say he tore down a village out of cruelty. The drawing rooms say worse. He has never once defended himself, because the truth he carries is too heavy to hand to strangers. He has lived alone for so long that he has forgotten what it feels like to be looked at without fear, and a governess in a grey dress, who looks back at him as though he were simply a man, undoes something in him he thought was permanently fixed.

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