He Offered to Save Her. She Needed Him to See Her.

It is release week for The Duke in Disguise, and although this book contains a vanished royal diamond, a forged identity, an auction-house conspiracy, and a hero pretending to be a duke, none of those things came first.

Leah and Simon did.

More precisely, they began with a proposal that went terribly wrong.

Six months before the novel opens, Simon Kingsley visits Leah Hart’s family home and offers her what he believes she needs: security, protection, and enough money to save her father’s struggling jewelry business.

He has considered every practical detail.

He can pay the debts. He can protect Leah. He can give her a future in which she will never again have to fear losing her home or watching her father’s life’s work collapse.

It is a generous offer.

It is also exactly the wrong one.

The problem with offering rescue

Simon loves by making himself useful.

He is the man people approach when a loan must be arranged, an apprentice needs a position, or a family requires help. He has built his life around solving problems because he has learned to believe that usefulness is what makes him worthy.

So when he proposes to Leah, he tells her everything he can do for her.

He does not tell her how he feels.

Leah hears a man calmly arranging her future as though it were another account to be settled. She hears protection instead of partnership and obligation instead of love.

She refuses him.

And because both of them are proud, frightened, and far too skilled at concealing the truth, they spend the next six months pretending it did not break their hearts.

The woman who does not want to be saved

Leah has good reason to mistrust rescue.

She is a gifted jewelry designer whose work has been praised, sold, and stolen without her name ever appearing beside it. She knows what it is to be useful while remaining invisible.

Her father’s workshop is failing. Another jewelry house is profiting from her designs. The men with the power to intervene would rather preserve one another’s reputations than listen to a tradesman’s daughter.

Leah does not need someone else to decide what should become of her life.

She needs the freedom to claim it.

That is why she refuses Simon, even though part of her wants him. Accepting his proposal feels too much like admitting she cannot save herself.

Then a forged letter takes her to Thornfield Park, where she intends to uncover the conspiracy destroying her family.

And there she encounters the last man she expected to see.

Simon.

Except now he is calling himself the Duke of Dunmore.

Two people pretending to be someone else

Simon has entered Thornfield Park with a dead duke’s signet ring, a carefully rehearsed accent, and a title that does not exist.

Leah has arrived as a lady’s companion carrying a forged recommendation.

Each recognizes the other immediately.

Each can expose the other.

And each is searching for evidence connected to the same auction house, the same dead jeweler, and the same missing diamond.

That gave me one of my favorite romantic dynamics: two former almost-lovers trapped inside a mutual deception.

To everyone else at Thornfield, Simon is a duke and Leah is a servant.

To one another, they are painfully, dangerously themselves.

Leah notices that Simon’s new boots have not yet learned to belong to him. She hears his real voice beneath the aristocratic drawl. Simon sees the jeweler’s daughter beneath Leah’s plain companion’s dress—and recognizes the same courage that made her refuse him.

The disguises conceal them from the house.

They do not conceal them from each other.

Learning to stand beside her

Simon’s first proposal fails because he positions himself between Leah and the world.

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