The Duke Who Didn't (Wedgeford Trials, #1)

by Courtney Milan

Chloe Fong retrieved her board clip from beneath her arm on a fateful spring dawn, not realizing that calamity was about to befall her carefully ordered list.

1.

“Chloe,” he said again. “It’s your decision. But please. Please never kiss a man who doesn’t think you deserve his effort.”

“You’ve said nothing about intimidating,” she said. “I see you don’t dispute that.” “Not in the slightest.” He looked into her eyes. “I want my wife to intimidate me. I want to know that her enemies will all fall before her. That’s the kind of woman I want by my side. She had better be intimidating.”

For a second, his lips hovered over hers. His face seemed to take up the entirety of her vision. How, then, was it that she could see the stars spangled across the sky behind him? An entire field of stars, the arm of the Milky Way, splashed around them.

“The truth is,” he told her, “I’m not like you. I don’t make lists. I don’t have rational explanations for everything. If you asked me why I wanted you, I wouldn’t be able to give a carefully thought-out account. I could only say that you make me feel like the home I want to live in.”

“It’s not foreign. That sauce was fermented here, with yeasts found in Wedgeford. The idea came from here. It was made here. If tea is British, this sauce is British. If this sauce is British, I am British, and my wife is British, and my children will be British. I need not change myself to belong. I already belong; it is the rest of England that is out of step.”