She shattered his heart—now she’s his perfect match.
Felix Seward, Duke of Kempbury, does not want to be at a house party. Any house party. But the matchmaker Mrs. Dove Lyon has promised him that his perfect match will be there, and Felix yearns for a wife.
He is horrified to find that the woman who meets the matchmaker’s description is Adaline Beverley. His nemesis. His Achilles heel.
The one woman on God’s earth he will never marry. Not after what she did last time they were betrothed.
Published July 30th
Excerpt
Felix did not go back to the house. More than ever, he needed to be alone. He needed to think. He took a path that led further out into the park. His mind was reeling.
In his country seat, Felix had a miniature of himself as a child of nine or ten. Melody Beverley could be that child’s twin, green eyes and all. It was easy to tell where her name had come from, for Adaline had once told him that her mother’s name was Melody.
Felix remembered everything she had told him in the brief few weeks of their romance. Everything she said and did, though his memories were colored by what came after.
He should have expected her to be a wanton. She was, after all, the baseborn child of Arthur Fairbanks and his mistress, even if she was raised in the Fairbanks house with the legitimate daughter. She had been honest with him about that even from the first.
He had admired her for it, he remembered, had said that he was a duke and could do anything he pleased short of treason, had said she would be a duchess and—even if people did find out about her tarnished birth—it wouldn’t matter, because she would be ranked above all but the queen and the royal princesses, and a score or so of other duchesses.
Even when she came to his bed, he didn’t despise her for it. They had made promises to one another, after all. He had thought only that she loved him too much to wait, or to make him wait, for them to repeat those vows in a church.
He had, at the time, believed her to be a virgin, though he had doubted that later. Whether or not it was true, he could no longer doubt that the child—of whose existence he had so recently learned—who went by the surname of Beverley was conceived on that night.
She was his daughter, and Adaline had kept her from him.
Felix was, he realized, being a little unfair. She had visited him at his townhouse and been turned away. She had written to him twice, and he had ordered the letters returned, refusing even to touch them.
He did not feel like being fair. He did not know how he felt, in fact. His mind, heart—his soul even—echoed with the beat of the repeated words. I have a daughter.
A daughter who was four months past her ninth birthday, if she was born nine months or so after the night that Felix and Adaline spent together. Felix had missed more than nine years of her life. It hurt more than he could bear, like an ache over his entire being. He felt as if he had missed her all his life, though two days ago, he had not even known she existed. “Adaline will not keep me out of my daughter’s life anymore,” he swore.
Melody. She seemed a nice child. She spoke politely and curtseyed beautifully, and there was obvious affection between her and her mother.
But was Adaline a fit person to raise a child? A daughter? If he did not intervene, would he not be condemning his own child to the kind of life Adaline must have lived? Condemning some poor fool to the kind of betrayal he had experienced?
He could take Melody from Adaline, citing her immoral conduct as a reason. The legal ground would be shaky, but he had no doubt he could succeed. Wealthy dukes had few limits. But was it the right thing to do?
No child deserved to lose a loving, even if unfit, . Felix did not remember his own mother, but he had seen his sister-in-law Dorcas with his nephew Stephen and her new baby. The impersonal attention of servants was no replacement for maternal affection.
No matter how far he walked, he could not make up his mind. “Felix, you need more facts,” he decided, as he made his way back towards the house. “Talk to Mrs. Stillwater. Talk to others who know Adaline. Talk to Adaline herself, as distasteful as that may be, to Melody. You are no longer a cub, still wet behind the ears. You won’t be taken in again.”
Felix was not altogether confident about the last point. Even with everything he knew about her, he still felt the tug in Adaline’s direction. But he was a man in his thirties, a respected peer, and a gentleman. He could trust himself to resist Adaline’s wiles and to do the right thing.
Couldn’t he?
