Ten Years Ago She Lent a Stranger Her Father's Watch — Now the Duke Has Come Back to Return It

Ten years ago, on the wettest night of a wet spring, Laura Morley pushed her dead father's silver watch through the window of a moving coach so that a soaked stranger in uniform would not miss his ship. She never learned his name. Now she keeps a small village school, and this afternoon a duke's carriage stands in her lane and the Duke of Lowther holds that same watch out to her on his open palm, still ticking, with a dent in the lid that was not there before. He came only to give it back and go. He has a bride chosen for him, a dinner in eleven days where the whole county will drink to her, and a promise his late brother left him to keep. But he has wound that watch every morning for ten years, and the woman who lent it is not at all what he pictured. A slow-burning Regency romance about one kindness and the man who could not forget it. The Loosened Cravat tells original period fiction: the village, the estate and every person here are invented, and everyone in the story is a grown adult. If this is your kind of love story, subscribe, and another one is coming.