Cole Armstrong left for the Peninsula as a younger son with an understanding between himself and Melody Carrow, yet he returns a duke and goes to Carrow House before his own.
Melody is seven and twenty, the county has finished discussing her, and after waiting for letters, then for an explanation, she refuses to be pitied again.
He swears he wrote for four years and that the silence was not his doing, while she knows she received nothing, and the search for that missing post leads into his own family's house.
He can prove the letters existed, but he cannot restore the mornings she came down early to meet the post.
A family secret there could ruin them both, even as a second chance and a marriage of convenience draw the soldier duke back to the spinster.
