A Convenient Ruin: A Story of Choices and Consequences

This book is a slow-burn Regency romance about two brilliantly guarded people forced into a fake engagement, and what happens when the performance becomes impossible to distinguish from the truth.

When Cecily Hartwell receives a summons to the Duke of Ashworth's study, she already knows what's at stake. The late Duke's will has placed a deadline on the marriages of his three wards — and if all three are not suitably settled before August, a third of the Ashworth estate will be forfeit. Cecily, sharp-tongued and fiercely self-sufficient, has spent four years as a ward avoiding exactly this kind of pressure. She has also spent four years pretending not to notice Caspian Ashworth.

Caspian, seventh Duke of Ashworth, is a man who manages everything — his estate, his obligations, his feelings — with the same cold precision. He has inherited debts, responsibilities, and three wards he has kept at careful professional distance. He has also spent four years failing to stop thinking about Cecily.

His proposal is elegant in its practicality: a false betrothal, conducted with enough conviction to satisfy the will, protect the estate, and give Cecily the financial independence she has never been offered. The terms will be negotiated fairly. Everything will be in writing.

Cecily agrees. And then she writes seventeen amendments.

What follows is a Regency romance built not on grand declarations but on the slow, devastating accumulation of detail: the contract negotiated across a rain-soaked Tuesday morning; the waltz at Almack's that was supposed to be performance and wasn't; the dawn ride at Hollowthorn Park where she beat him to the top of the hill by four lengths and he understood, with sudden and complete clarity, that he was irrevocably in trouble. The house party that strips away every structure they have built. The storm that finally makes honesty unavoidable.

Cecily Hartwell is a woman who has managed harder things than this. She has managed her father's ruin, four Seasons of unsuitable men, and twenty-six months of careful feelings she has kept in a locked drawer labelled do not open. She is not going to let a fake engagement undo her.

Amendment Seventeen exists for a reason.

But some things cannot be contracted for. Some things cannot be managed. And when the performance ends and the truth remains — warm and persistent and slightly sweet, with something underneath you cannot name but would recognise if you lost it — no amendment in the world will be sufficient.

A Convenient Ruin is a story about two people who are better at duty than desire, about the cost of protecting yourself from what you need, and about what it means to finally stop managing something and let it be real.

The arrangement was supposed to be temporary.

The truth had other plans.

© 2026 PublishDrive (E-bog): 6610001186661

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 17. marts 2026