She refused to become his duchess. Now she’s fleeing into a frozen night with a sharp-tongued Scottish stable hand – and nowhere is safe enough to stop. Edith Bromley has tried everything – tears, reason, logic, more tears – but her parents will not be moved. She is to marry the infamous Duke Valtravers, a man whose scandalous reputation precedes him by several counties, and whose bed is already occupied the very night before their wedding. So Edith does the only sensible thing: she packs a carpet bag, pulls on her breeches, and runs. What she doesn’t plan for is Robbie Stewart – a broad-shouldered, infuriatingly perceptive Scottish stable hand who sees straight through every excuse she offers and refuses to let her ride off alone into a December blizzard. He has his own reasons for needing to disappear, and now they’re both fugitives – on foot, half-frozen, sharing a draughty barn and the kind of forced proximity that makes sensible people do very foolish things. He’s quick with a laugh, quicker with a plan, and entirely too warm to stand beside when the wind howls. But Valtravers is not a man who accepts humiliation quietly, and every mile between Edith and the altar is a mile he intends to close. Can Edith outrun a duke’s fury, her family’s expectations, and her own inconvenient feelings for the man beside her – before the road north runs out?
