A Convenient Bride for the Duke

He must marry within six weeks. She has eleven days before the sheriff comes. Marianne Shawcross has kept her father’s accounts since she was eleven years old, and the sums have finally run out. Then the cold, unsmiling Duke of Aldermere climbs three flights of stairs above a chandler’s shop with an offer no sensible woman could refuse. He proposes six months of marriage, her father’s debts paid and a settlement in her own name, on one condition he wrote into the contract himself. Neither of them shall require affection of the other. It should be the simplest bargain in England. But Marianne cannot stop counting his candles, caring for his tenants or moving her chair a little closer to his desk, and the duke who has never asked anyone for anything finds himself listening for her humming at breakfast.