The Duke's Fiancée Pushed Her Into the Lake at the Garden Party — She Rose and Everything Changed

Sixty guests on a sunny lawn in July, striped awnings, lemon ices, and a duke giving his betrothal toast. At the stone balustrade above the lake stands Kate Linnell, the hired water-engineer's daughter in her one good ivory gown, the woman who just made the silent Duke of Wrayburn laugh out loud. Lady Selina Vardon, his betrothed in poppy-red silk, comes down the lawn smiling. "Then do show us your water, Miss Linnell." Two gloved hands, one hard shove, a parasol turning over in the sunlight, a sheet of white spray. The county waits for her to come up weeping. Instead, her feet find a stone shelf her own father built, and Kate Linnell stands up, waist-deep, and tells the whole lawn exactly how deep the lake is. The duke goes down the boat steps into the water in his boots, and his pale green coat is round her shoulders before she has her footing. By nightfall the Earl of Kestrell has presented his bill: the hired woman gone from the parish, an apology over the soup, or the brook that feeds the lake stays diverted for good. But Kate has her father's field book, an old shepherd who once held his chain, and a boundary stone on the open down that stands six chains from where it should. And the duke has a secret no one in the county knows, one that only a woman who reads land the way he does could ever understand. This is a dramatized fictional story. Names, places and events are fictional. #dukestories #regencyromance #audiobook