The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Name: The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride
Author: Catherine Bilson

57 pages

Ophelia James fled her own wedding, leaving a viscount at the altar with the settlements signed and half of fashionable London in the pews. She knows well it will have been the scandal of the Season, but she could not make herself marry a man who despised her.

Under her godmother’s protection in a low grey house in the Welsh mountains, she goes by Miss Jones: a nobody in borrowed gowns, half a world from her mother’s Bombay and out of reach of her father’s East India fortune. Then the snow closes the passes, and a duke comes up the drive.

Adrian Sutton, sixth Duke of Calder, has come to the one house where nobody has ever asked him to be a duke. His aunt meets him at the door without smiling, and there is a young woman on the stairs, small and still in a gown a governess might have worn, who watches him the way a fox watches the hounds.
He cannot abide a cold table. On his second evening he sets about warming this one the only way he knows — with the funniest story in London. A nabob’s daughter. A signed settlement. A church full of people, and a bride who never came. He is well into it before he notices that nobody is laughing.

Ophelia keeps to her room after that, and gives him as little as she can. A curious man could cost her everything. Then the magic of Christmas begins to work on her, and she finds herself singing her mother’s Gujarati carol in a candlelit chapel, with the one man who could expose her standing beside her.
The snow will not hold the pass forever, and the man she ran from needs her fortune far too badly to ever stop looking.

A sweet Regency Christmas romance — snowbound in a remote Welsh manor, a runaway bride in hiding, and a duke who notices far too much. Clean and wholesome, and full of snow, candlelight and Christmas carols.

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