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A DUKE LIKE NO OTHER  by Valerie Bowman

A DUKE LIKE NO OTHER

by Valerie Bowman

Pub Date: May 1st, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12173-8
Publisher: St. Martin's

A married couple faces the mystery of whether they can learn to love each other again.

Mark and Nicole Grimaldi have been married for 10 years and three months but haven’t seen each other for a decade. Only three months into what both thought would be their happily-ever-after, a mutual betrayal sent Nicole to France to serve England as a spy, and soon after, Cpl. Mark Grimaldi doubled down on his work for the military to forget her. Now they both need each other again: Now a general, Mark must prove he’s a family man in order to achieve his lifelong goal of being promoted to Home Secretary, and Nicole wants a child. She agrees to come back to London and play the role of devoted wife, and he agrees to sleep with her until she gets pregnant, at which point she’ll go back to France and they’ll live separately for good. Secretly, both have remained celibate in their time apart, and they begin falling for each other again no matter how much they try to keep their passionate moments purely about procreation. Despite their chemistry, however, the secrets that broke up their first go-round may disallow a second happy ending. The ninth entry in the Playful Brides series features another strong heroine who knows what she wants and another hero who may have waited too long to prove himself to his true love—always a winning combination in Bowman’s (The Right Kind of Rogue, 2017, etc.) hands. Nicole and Mark’s tense conversations and hot sex scenes drive the story forward predictably, but as it progresses, the plot develops with several interesting twists that make the ending all the more satisfying. Many readers will be delighted to see the Bow Street Runners so central to the story, and fans of second-chance romance will be charmed from the first chapter.

A mature, suspense-filled Regency romance.