She knew it, even if the wide world was so far beyond her reach she couldn’t even imagine where it began. No, there was nothing in the wide world like his laugh. Tall and lean and already so clever and cunning and the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, blond hair too long over bright amber eyes that held a thousand secrets, and a quiet, barely ever heard laugh-so rare that when it came, it felt like a gift. Twelve years old and full of fire and strength and the world beyond. Offering that useless girl, the mewling babe in nurse’s arms, nothing more than a half life, full of the aching loneliness that came from a world so large and so small, all at once.Īnd then he’d arrived, one year earlier. Given a boy’s name and title before God even as the man who was not her father paid servants and priests for silence and falsified documents and laid plans to replace her mother’s bastard daughter with one of his own bastard sons, born on the same day as she-to women who were not his duchess-offering him a single path to a ducal legacy. Swaddled in the rich lace reserved for a long line of dukes, anointed with oils reserved for the most privileged of Burghsey House residents. It didn’t matter that her world had been limited to the three thousand acres of fertile land boasting fluffy white sheep and massive hay bales and a community of people with whom she was not allowed to speak-to whom she was virtually invisible-because she was a secret that was to be kept at all costs.Ī girl, baptized the heir to the Dukedom of Marwick. Or that she’d never heard a language other than English, or seen a play, or listened to an orchestra. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know the sounds of the city or the smell of the ocean. She’d never strayed far from this enormous manor house, tucked into the quiet Essex countryside two days’ walk northeast of London, where rolling green hills turned to wheat as autumn crept across the land.

It didn’t matter that she was unqualified to speak of the wide world.

There was nothing in the wide world like his laugh.

Sarah maclean daring and the duke