DREAMING OF A DUKE LIKE YOU

A duke not to the manner born meets challenges with some new ideas.

Gabriel Cadieux, the owner of a London gaming hell—he won it playing cribbage—doesn’t know he’s a duke. Sent to a foundling home at age 3, he’s since made a name for himself. Vivienne Tremeer, the daughter of a baronet, has fled to London from Cornwall with her younger brother, Will. She’s a virtuous woman, but through a scandal not of her making and “certainly not her fault,” her reputation is “ruined beyond repair.” Her stepfather, a drunken spendthrift, is pressing Vivienne into a loveless marriage so he can steal her dowry. As the story begins, Will has fallen in with bad friends, gambled recklessly, and lost more money than he can pay Gabriel. Fearing they may lose everything, Viv begs Gabriel to forgive the debt. To which, of course, he says nothing doing. But they impress each other; there’s a frisson. She’s especially surprised to see The Wicked Prince and His Stolen Bride, a romance she wrote with her cousin, on Gabriel’s bookshelf. Not long after, a lawyer arrives to tell Gabriel he’s not an orphan. His father has just died, and Gabriel is, in fact, the sixth Duke of Grantham; a guilty priest has confessed that his father, the former duke, secretly married his mother, a poor Frenchwoman, before he was born. The fifth duke’s second wife is now a mistress, their six daughters are illegitimate, and if Gabriel rejects the dukedom, they will be left penniless. So Gabriel takes the high road. To prepare his eldest half-sister for her debut, he hires Vivienne. She can work for him and pay Will’s debt that way. The predictable problem: Though they love each other, he cannot fulfill his aristocratic duties by marrying a fallen woman and she cannot believe a duke would ever want a woman with a soiled reputation. With the encouragement of his six new sisters, Gabriel thumbs his nose at convention and rides to Cornwall to propose.

All the duke romance conventions are here, and Bennett also makes her lovers into friends.