The Earl’s Secretary

By Odette Valehart

A disgraced woman and a reclusive earl risk another scandal for love.

About the story

She needs honest work. His household is not ready for her application.

Cecilia has already spent the money she expects from a translation—coal, boots, perhaps a library subscription—when reality makes another plan necessary. Two years after a scandal, she is living with her aunt and running out of ways to make gentility stretch into a livelihood.

The Earl of Rothbury needs a secretary. His injured hand makes writing difficult, and his reclusive household has little interest in a stranger from London. A woman with Cecilia’s history is hardly the conventional applicant. She walks to Rothbury Park anyway, because examining her courage too closely might cost her the chance to use it.

A forbidden Regency romance about useful work, damaged reputations, and the risks two guarded people take when society has already decided who they are.

Your kind of romance?

• A disgraced gentlewoman seeking work
• A reclusive earl with an injured hand
• Regency household atmosphere
• A forbidden employer-and-secretary connection

Read a short excerpt

From the opening pages

I told my aunt I was going to call on Mrs. Fenwick about a pattern for a cap. I walked instead the mile and a half to Rothbury Park, along the path that ran between the two properties through a stand of beech trees just beginning to turn, and I did not let myself think too hard about what I meant to say, because I had learned that courage, examined too closely, tends to dissolve.

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