A Ruinous Negotiation

When botanist and naturalist Harriet Voss receives her fifth rejection from the Royal Philosophical Society, she knows the problem isn't her research — it's her name. In 1815 London, a woman cannot publish, present, or be taken seriously without a man's endorsement. What she needs is a husband. Not for love. For access.

When Nicholas Vane, Earl of Vane, discovers that a legal challenge threatens his guardianship of his four-year-old niece Eliza — the last piece of his shattered family — his solicitor delivers the coldest possible advice: get a wife. Not for companionship. For credibility.

The solution they negotiate is ruthlessly practical. Harriet gets a Fellow's sponsorship and a name on her research submissions. Nicholas gets a wife of good standing in time for the custody hearing. Both get exactly what they asked for. Neither expects anything more.

But the Upper Brook Street household has other ideas.

A Ruinous Negotiation is a slow-burn Regency romance built on contracts, beetles, and the dangerous intimacy of two people who have promised each other nothing but honesty. Harriet — precise, brilliant, allergic to performance — finds herself explaining entomology to a grief-quieted four-year-old on a nursery floor, and discovering that she is, unexpectedly, exactly what this child needs. Nicholas — a Waterloo veteran carrying the particular damage of a man who learned to survive by never asking for help — finds that a woman who corrects him, challenges him, and sits with him in the dark at two in the morning is the first person since the war who makes the world feel stable again.

The arrangement was designed to stay contractual. What it produces is something neither party knew how to put on a candidate list.

Featuring a marriage-of-convenience that evolves with aching patience, a found family assembled from grief and good faith, a PTSD hero who learns — slowly, imperfectly, and with profound emotional honesty — to stop managing his feelings away from the people he loves, and a bluestocking heroine whose notebooks, amendments, and seventeen requirements are no match for the one variable she failed to account for.

When a long-buried trust and a calculating solicitor threaten to unravel everything they have built, Harriet and Nicholas must face the truth: the arrangement was never what held them together. They were.

Perfect for fans of Evie Dunmore, Megan Frampton, and Talia Hibbert. If you love slow-burn romance, witty heroines with ambition, emotionally complex heroes, and Regency settings with real historical texture, A Ruinous Negotiation will leave you reaching for the next book in the Masquerade Marriages Trilogy the moment you turn the final page.

Some contracts are signed in ink. Some in something far more permanent.

© 2026 PublishDrive (E-bog): 6610001186654

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 17. marts 2026