She Was Sent To Apologise for Her Father's Debts

Evelyn Radthorpe had spent her whole life being the one who was sent — sent to the neighbours, sent to the shops, sent to carry her family's need to strangers' doors, because a plain girl with a steady voice can go where a proud man cannot. So when her father lay ruined by a debt he could not pay, it was Evelyn who put on her one good cloak and walked through the cold spring rain to the pale door of the coldest man in England, to say a word her family owed and to beg, not for forgiveness, but for a little time. The Duke of Brookhaven had refused thirty women that season, and everyone in London had a name for what that made him. He weighed rank against faults behind every suitor's eyes; he had watched them all do the same small sum. But the wet, plain girl who walked in from the rain did not look at his coronet, or his fortune, or the title they all married and called by his name. She looked at his dead garden — and she called it a living thing that no one had forgiven. And the coldest man in England found, to his own alarm, that he could imagine a life. What he offered her was not mercy but a bargain, plainly named, with a clock ticking behind it. What she answered was stranger still, and truer, and hers alone. Yet the world does not leave such marriages in peace, and a beautiful woman who had believed the Duke was always to be hers had gone quiet — which, in a woman like that, is never the same as gone. She had bought an old man's hidden shame, and she meant to make it break a marriage she was never part of. And when she laid her terms on the table, the plain girl who had stopped hiding long ago would have to decide, once and for all, what a person will and will not sell. A tender regency tale of a woman who was always sent and never chosen, and the cold, guarded man who looked at her face and not her hem, and saw the one true thing that was hers. Sit back, relax, and let this story carry you to the candlelit ballrooms and great houses of old England. #regencyromance #freeaudiobook #britishroyalty #romance #shortstory #bedtimestoryforgrownups