A Scandalous Kind of Duke
Heart-warming, steamy, and emotional, this is the story of two people who try to end their friendship, but find they cannot part.
Scroll down for excerpts and links!
Two friends. Too many missed chances.
Leopold Halton, the Duke of Dammerton, is the man with everything: perfect hair, beautiful waistcoats, and London’s finest collection of decorative objects. But two years after his highly entertaining divorce (entertaining for everyone but him, that is), Leo still doesn’t have what he wants most: another wife.
Leo is ready to propose to a suitable lady, but with gossip dissecting his every move, the family of his nearly-ideal bride demands that he first stop calling on artist Juno Bell, the first woman he ever kissed and now, a decade later, his friend.
After ten years of hard work to become an artist, Juno has everything she dreamed of: a flourishing studio, a wealthy patroness, and the freedom to live as she pleases. She even receives visits from a duke (and don’t London’s gossips love that!).
Juno has always known she can never hold on to Leo, yet when he declares their friendship must end, she finds it harder than expected to let him go. At least, not without a kiss.
After all, if their friendship must end anyway, then they have nothing more to lose … right?
Ebook and paperback out now
Audiobook coming 20 December 2022, narrated by Kate Reading
Read an excerpt
It was a chance encounter, as all their daily meetings were, the pair of them somehow treading the same woodland paths in the first hours of daylight, while Juno’s family slept. Early morning was the best time of day, they agreed, when the air was crisp and unsullied and full of hope.
The meetings were not secret, but neither ever spoke of them. It was simpler that way. Leo was a guest, visiting at seventeen, eighteen, now nineteen; Juno was two years younger. Erroneous assumptions would be made, accusations hurled, punches thrown. Even Juno’s family would not understand the innocent fervor of their friendship: their wide-ranging conversations, their free laughter, their sense of belonging found nowhere else. And honor demanded Leo never take it beyond friendship, not when he was heir to a duke and Juno his friend’s low-born cousin. Quite the little joke Fate had played, putting Juno Bell in his path, close enough to touch, yet forever out of reach.
That morning, their rambles ended in a meadow, chaperoned by an ancient oak and excitable birds. They were arguing, playfully, about whether the delicate pink wildflowers were called “cuckoo flowers” or “lady’s smock.” They were everywhere, amid splashes of blue and yellow, red and white, the masses of English wildflowers carpeting the fields and just now opening to greet the sun.
“Cuckoo flowers,” Juno said, holding one aloft, its four pale petals quivering. “Because they bloom when the first cuckoo arrives.”
“Lady’s smock,” Leo insisted, though he didn’t care about the name. He cared about the laughter dancing in her eyes, bluer than the morning sky behind her. He cared about her air of a pagan goddess, with wildflowers woven through her fair, unbound curls.
He cared about the way he felt when he was with her: free, alive, whole.
Dancing backward, she brandished her flower at him like a sword. He plucked one of his own to accept the challenge, and laughing, they dueled with the flowers. Until she broke through his guard and brushed the petals over his cheek. Their eyes met. Their smiles faded. His breath stopped. His heart thumped.
Then she stretched up and leaned in and pressed her soft lips to his. Sensations cascaded through him, warm and hopeful, magical, sensual, as nothing he had ever known before. How he welcomed her kiss, wanted it, needed it, closing his eyes, moving his lips against hers, burying his hands in her hair. He hadn’t a clue what he was doing, but she had already taught him there were times to stop thinking, to surrender to one’s senses and simply respond as felt right.
When they parted, they were breathless, sharing shy, astonished, delighted smiles. Reborn into a world forever changed.
It was his first ever kiss, and the sweetest moment of his life.
Then Juno said, “I love you.”
And Leo said—nothing.
His throat froze. His mouth opened, shut, opened, shut, his words held prisoner by the war raging inside him. He had duties and obligations: This must stop now. He had her kiss lingering on his lips: This must never stop.
His torn silence dragged on until it filled the meadow.
Juno’s expression dimmed. Her shoulders slumped. And now she was backing away from him, her lips twisted, perhaps in a bitter smile, perhaps in a fight against tears. All the while, she was nodding sadly, as if to say, What else did I expect? Of course.
He reached for her hand, savored a desperate, desolate brush of skin before she pulled away.
“We cannot be together in any way,” he finally croaked, his throat tight, icy, aching. “I must consider my duty to my family when I choose a wife. You are my friend’s kin and Sir Gordon’s niece, so honor demands that I never touch— Even a kiss is not—” He tried again. “The future—”
“Oh, enough with the future, duty, honor, family,” she snapped. “Why must you carry them all with you? Why can we not be two people alone in a meadow, without you bringing everyone else along too? Do you think me so simple? I know we can never be together.”
Then she laughed, softly, bitterly, even as she blinked away tears. “How stifling and miserable your life is, that you may not even kiss a girl in a meadow. I—” She paused to consult the old oak tree, before facing him defiantly. “I shall be an artist, and no one’s wife or mistress. I only wanted to kiss you and tell you that I love you, because I’m alive and you’re alive, and we’re young and beautiful and here. I know better than anybody that nothing lasts forever. Nothing ever stays. Not even this.”
She flung her crumpled flower at him and whirled away, her dew-soaked skirts clinging to the backs of her legs as she carved a path through the grass.
Leo wanted to surge after her and cry that of course he had to bring it all with him. His ancient family, his name, his duty, his honor—they were as much a part of him as his own skin and bones. He had to choose them, didn’t she see? He had to put his duty first.
He might never make her understand, but perhaps he would have tried, had she looked back.
She didn’t look back.
Juno wished she could play Leo’s game of studied indifference, but that fluttering had started up again inside her, an intense fluttering from her throat to her thighs, the sort of fluttering that could be relieved only by a lover’s touch.
Desperate to move, she rose, crossed to a glass-fronted cabinet, stared unseeingly past her own ghostly reflection to the wooden toys within.
“He was your lover, this architect,” Leo said.
His atypical bluntness startled her. She pivoted to face him. “And if he was?”
“You mentioned you have criteria. For your liaisons.”
“Just as you have criteria for your marriages.” She gave him what she hoped was an arch look. “At any rate, you do not meet my criteria.”
“I never imagined I did.”
“Then my intimate affairs are none of your concern.”
Conducting affairs was a risky business; slow, careful negotiations were required. She pursued liaisons for sensual pleasure and release. She pursued them because she did not want to lock parts of herself away. She pursued them because sometimes she felt lonely and craved another person’s touch.
She did not pursue them for passion.
But better Leo did not know that. Better to portray herself as a passionate lover, and for Leo to lie awake at night, ruing what he had missed.
Yes, she would very much like for Leo to rue what he had missed. It would serve him right, for casting her off like a troublesome lover when she’d never even enjoyed the pleasures of his bed.
He eased away from the desk, toward her. “If your lovers are none of my concern, why the effort to ensure I knew of them?”
Heat slithered over her at being caught out. “How very self-centered to imagine my story had anything to do with you. St. Blaise was asking questions and I had to answer them. Rules of etiquette.”
“You blithely ignore any rule you don’t like. If you didn’t want to answer his questions, you wouldn’t have. Come, Juno. You say you prize candor. Try some candor now.”
Still he advanced. Her heart fluttered with each slow, deliberate step. An answering pulse beat between her thighs. For Leo to speak so bluntly, to look at her so intently… How greatly everything was changing, and how fast.
“Very well, my criteria.” She swallowed. Leaning back against the cabinet, trying to appear worldly, she marked the items off on her suddenly shaky fingers. “I appreciate a lover with attention to detail, someone who is creative, someone who takes his time. He must promise mutual pleasure and commit to protecting me from consequences. Most importantly, he must be planning to leave London.”
“So your ideal man is one who will not stay. Tell me.” He halted before her, just out of reach. Her fingers tangled around themselves. “Of all your lovers, were any special to you?”
Juno choked. “Of all my … How many do you imagine there were?”
“I am trying very hard not to imagine it.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “It is irrelevant how many in total. I’m asking how many were special to you.”
…
Leo stepped closer. Her head jerked up. Another step. Every inch of him was taut and intent like a beast on the hunt. She did not recognize him like this; she wondered if he recognized himself. Call her terrible for provoking him, call her weak for wanting him, but oh, she did enjoy watching Leo grapple with his own control.
He planted his hands on the polished cedar on either side of her, trapping her between his body and the cabinet. His scent and heat infused her. She straightened, but that served only to bring her face closer to his: to his firm jaw and tempting mouth and the pulse pounding at the edge of his cravat.
“Were any of them special?” he repeated in a low, velvet voice, better suited to pillows at midnight. “Did they keep you awake all night, aching with longing? Did they become so essential to you that losing them felt like slicing out a piece of your soul? Did their kisses seep so deeply into your blood that you would have burned down your world for one more kiss?”
She had no words. No thoughts. Only sensations remained: a fierce hunger, a wild fever, and somewhere deep and forgotten, a gaping emptiness that ached.
And Leo’s eyes, imprisoning hers, promising heady adventures like a distant mountain range.
He was going to kiss her and they both knew it.
The Longhope Abbey series
Longhope Abbey is a fictional parish in Warwickshire, England. The parish is named for the ruins of a medieval abbey. Among the residents of Longhope Abbey are the Larke family, the Lightwell family, and the Bell family, who are friends and neighbors. The characters in the series are connected to these families.
In A Scandalous Kind of Duke, Juno Bell was adopted happily into the Bell family, as niece of Sir Gordon and Lady Hester Bell, and cousin to Hadrian, Phoebe, Livia and Daniel. She first met Leopold Halton, the Duke of Dammerton, when he was visiting her house, as a school friend of her cousin Hadrian Bell.