The Earl's Inconvenient Ward

I knelt at a dying man's bedside and swore I would protect his daughter.

I had never met her.

I am Julian Blackwood, Earl of Ashworth, and a year later that promise arrives in a letter that nearly stops my heart.

By order of the Court of Chancery, I am now sole guardian of Miss Charlotte Grey — eighteen years old, motherless, and entirely my responsibility until she marries or comes of age.

I hold her annuity.
I approve or refuse any suitor for her hand.
She is, in every way the law allows, a prisoner.

And I am a man with empty coffers, a crumbling estate, and a mother who reminds me in every letter that the sensible match — the necessary match — is the heiress Viola Markham, who is determined to become my countess.

Charlotte Grey was never meant to be more than a duty.

But she arrives clever as a whip and unafraid of me, a girl who only ever wanted to be allowed to read, and the house that was supposed to merely shelter her begins, somehow, to wake up around her.

I tell myself I feel nothing.
I write letters to her that I never send.

Then a dance changes everything, and I am no longer pretending.

I cannot have her.
I am her guardian. I am promised elsewhere. The whole of society would call it the worst kind of scandal.

And there is a poison in my past, and an heiress who will not be set aside, both circling the one truth I have hidden even from myself.

"The cost of loving you," I told her, in the moment everything broke, "is more than either of us can afford."

She deserves freedom, not a cage with my name on the lock.

But regret is a splinter, and a promise made to a dying friend was never meant to cost me my own heart.

If I want her, I will have to open the one door I swore I would keep shut — and risk everything I was raised to protect.

The Earl's Inconvenient Ward is a tender, forbidden Regency romance about a guardian and his ward, an impossible promise, public humiliation, a rival heiress, buried secrets, and a love neither of them was supposed to feel.

Perfect for readers who love guardian-ward romance, forbidden love, brooding wounded earls, spirited bookish heroines, slow-burn Regency longing, and historical romance with a hard-earned happy ending. A standalone Regency romance.