She was prepared to be his doxy…not his duchess. Society has a word for Athena Oliphant, and it isn’t lady.
She bore her son without a husband, told the gossips exactly what she thought of their opinions, and has spent five gloriously unrepentant years doing precisely as she pleases.
She doesn’t attend balls, she doesn’t chase lords, and she absolutely does not care what the matrons of the Dumpkins house party whisper about her behind their fans.
What she does care about—rather inconveniently—is Cash, the golden-haired, broad-shouldered man she met by the river.
He makes her laugh, helps their sons climb trees together, and has been very strongly hinting he’d like her to be his mistress.
She was going to say yes. She’d already decided. Then Lady Dumpkins introduced them at the ball, and Athena discovered that Cash is short for Cashard — as in, the Duke of.
As in, the cold and imperious marriage prize every mother at the house party has been scheming to catch all summer.
As in, the man with too much honor to proposition an earl’s daughter, no matter how scandalous she might be.
