Secrets of Stonebridge

Juliana Fairfax has one job: teach the Duke of Stonebridge how to choose a wife. Not become one.

She has been perfectly fine about Benjamin Cavendish for five years. She is very good at it. But when her brother asks her to spend a month at Stonebridge coaching his closest friend through the social machinery of a house party—the dancing, the complimenting, the not mentioning dead pheasants—she tells herself it is a professional arrangement. She will teach him. He will choose someone appropriate. She will go home to Hertfordshire and continue being fine.

What she does not account for is Benjamin himself. The man who cannot compliment a hat without catastrophe turns out to be quietly, devastatingly observant—leaving bluebells on the breakfast table before dawn, sliding a copied poem under her door at midnight, painting a watercolour of their race across the north meadow and leaving it unsigned on her dressing table. Because Benjamin Cavendish has never learned to say with words what he can say with everything else.

And then Juliana overhears something she was never meant to hear, and the careful professional distance she has been maintaining collapses entirely — because the man she has spent five years trying not to love is in danger, and she has only just allowed herself to have him.

Secrets of Stonehenge is a Regency romance about a man who speaks in bluebells, watercolours, and anonymous poems, and the woman who finally teaches him to sign his name.