Rawden’s Duty by Tessa Murran

He marries for duty, but will he stay for love?

Captain Rawden Voss has a fearsome reputation and is the scandal of society. He enjoys a careless, libertine lifestyle, spurning convention and seducing his mistress. One sultry summer night, he encounters an enchanting young woman whose innocence he finds strangely compelling. She spurns his clumsy advances, so he determines to put her out of his mind. Meanwhile, Napoleon is massing his troops in Europe for a confrontation that will change Rawden’s life forever. In the aftermath of a terrible battle, duty compels him to fulfil a deathbed promise – protect a helpless woman from the wolves of the ton.

Grace Howden is impoverished, orphaned and has woeful prospects of matrimony. Despised by the spiteful, lofty ladies of the ton, she is dependent on the charity of a miserly uncle who seeks to sell her to the highest bidder in the marriage market and even outside it! When tragedy leaves her facing degradation, brutish Rawden Voss steps in and offers her a rough kind of salvation.

Two strangers who mistrust each other are thrown into a marriage of convenience. Rawden Voss can have no use for a wife, save one, so how can Grace trust his promise to forgo the privileges of the marriage bed? As the two unwilling partners struggle to find common ground, another, more ruthless suitor stalks Grace, and he will do anything to possess her, sparking ferocious jealousy in Rawden.

Grace is about to find out just how Rawden earned his fierce reputation.