The Beastly Duke’s Inevitable Surrender by Emma Dusk
“She was wagered in a game of cards.
He intends to win far more than her obedience.”
When Celine Beckett learns her father has gambled away everything, including her future, she expects ruin. What she does not expect is a marriage demanded by the most feared man in London.
Elias West, the Beast of Berkeley Square, is a ruthless earl whose icy control and dark reputation keep society at a careful distance. His proposal is not a request. It is a calculated claim, one that trades Celine’s freedom for her family’s salvation and binds her to a man whispered about with equal parts terror and fascination.
Within the forbidding walls of his London house, Celine discovers a husband carved of secrets and contradictions. Elias offers her safety behind locked doors, space behind separate bedchambers… and a wedding band that marks her as his. He watches her with a hunger he never voices, maintaining iron discipline even as desire coils dangerously beneath the surface.
Their marriage begins as a bargain struck under duress, but every charged glance, every razor-edged exchange, every brush of restrained heat threatens to turn their carefully negotiated union into something far more perilous.
As defiance tangles with temptation and the walls Elias has spent a lifetime building begin to crack, Celine must decide whether to fear the Beast she married…
or become the one woman capable of bringing him to his knees.
A forced marriage.
A beastly, brooding earl undone by the wife he cannot control.
A sharp-tongued heroine who refuses to be owned.
Their union may have been forged in a wager, but the passion that follows is a gamble neither of them knows how to survive.
Scandal-soaked ballrooms, guarded hearts, and desires that refuse to be denied place two broken souls on the edge of surrender, where passion may heal them… or destroy them both.
