Description

Algernon Sweet, Duke of Ravenswood, has a plan. Travel to London. Propose to the rich titled widow who can solve all his financial woes. Easy. Or it would be if he weren't trapped at a country inn by rising floodwaters where he encounters a childhood friend who once read poetry to his dog and questioned him about everything under the sun. Margaret Black turned grown-up is a distraction, even more a bluestocking, and inconveniently attractive, too. When it becomes clear she needs help to reach her father, he offers a seat in his carriage—purely out of politeness, of course. And not at all because she makes him laugh like no woman ever has.

Maggie Black has never quite belonged—not in drawing rooms, not in London, and certainly not stranded at an inn with a duke. Trading stories about their very different lives and discussing books over bad stew and too much brandy late at night isn't a good idea for a spinster traveling without a chaperone. But it's hard to resist a man who's both familiar and frustratingly handsome—especially when he hangs on her every word as if she were the only woman in the world. Somewhere between road delays, accidental confessions, and a scandalously intimate stop in a bookshop, Maggie finds herself falling for the one man who absolutely cannot be hers. Because dukes don't marry poor bluestockings with a passion for books and a tendency to argue…or do they?