Lady Arabella’s Reluctant Hero (The Duchess’s Darling Debutantes, #3)

"Every young lady deserves a champion. Even the ones who insist they don't need one. Especially those ones, in fact." — The Dowager Duchess of Ashworth, who collects difficult debutantes the way other women collect china

He's the kind of man who saves damsels in distress. She's... not the damsel he had in mind.

All of London knows that Lord Alderton has come to Town to find a kind, gentle mother for his daughter.

All of London would agree — Lady Arabella Wycliffe is not her.

She's the Season's reigning beauty and its most dangerous gossip. So when he finds her in the midst of a panic attack in a moonlit garden, she is not exactly the damsel he would have chosen.

And when they're caught together? Well. She isn't proud of what she does next. But a good man like Alderton shouldn't expect that same goodness from her. Everyone knows her reputation.

Of course, there are reasons for her bad reputation. But Arabella would rather be hated than pitied.

Alderton, however, doesn't seem inclined toward either. One look at the bruises on her throat, and the fury in Alderton's eyes nearly brings her to her knees. Then he makes her laugh when she's certain she'd forgotten how.

And when a scheming duchess bundles them off to the country together — along with his ten-year-old daughter, who is alarmingly honest and entirely too easy to love — Arabella starts to see something she never planned for.

A family. A home. The kind of man who has never once asked her to be anything other than exactly what she is.

But Arabella has secrets she can't outrun. And the closer she gets to a life worth wanting, the harder it becomes to keep them.

If Lord Alderton discovers what she's really been hiding, will he still see the woman underneath?

And if he does — is she someone worth fighting for?

A sweet Regency romance featuring a reformed villainess, a protective single father, and a dowager duchess who is entirely too pleased with herself.