"YOU'RE NOT WHAT I ORDERED", THE DUKE SAID — SHE HANDED BACK HIS RING AND WALKED OUT

A young woman travels four days through spring rain to meet the Duke of Ashcombe on the morning of her own marriage interview. She steps down from a hired chaise in a mud-hemmed grey travelling gown. A duke's household of four footmen, a steward, and a housekeeper does not treat her as a guest. In the grand marble hall she is told, without preamble, that she is not what he ordered. She folds the Burgundy velvet cloth neatly over the emerald ring he has slid across the table, places the whole bundle back into his open hand, and walks out of Ashcombe Manor on her own feet. Evangeline Marchmont is twenty-four, plain-spoken, clever at account books, and has spent five years as the household's convenience in her uncle's house — a girl sent in her prettier cousin's place because her cousin refused to come. Maxwell Ashworth, the new Duke of Ashcombe, is thirty-one, eleven months into an inheritance he does not yet understand, and has just said the first sentence he should not have said. By the time her hired chaise reaches the village inn he is already going up the back stairs of his own house to open a walnut writing-desk that has not been opened in five years. Listen to the full story by candlelight — a regency romance of a returned ring, a steward's quiet fraud, a late duke's unfinished correspondence, a two-mile walk up a spring lane, a village schoolroom full of the letter c, and the slow discovery, between two people of some competence, that the match neither of them had chosen was the one that had been waiting for them all along. --- Adrian's Fireside Stories — Regency romance audiobooks read by the fire. New stories every week. #RegencyRomance #Audiobook #DukeRomance #ForcedMatch #HistoricalRomance #SlowBurn #EnemiesToLovers #EnglishManor #RegencyEra #StorytimeYouTube