Algernon Sweet, Duke of Ravenswood, has a plan. Travel to London. Propose to the rich titled widow who can solve all is financial woes. Easy. Or it would be if he weren't trapped at a country inn by rising floodwaters where he encounters a childhood friend who once read poetry to his dog and questioned him about everything under the sun. Margaret Black turned grown-up is a distraction, even more a bluestocking, and inconveniently attractive, too. When it becomes clear she needs help to reach her father, he offers a seat in his carriage-purely out of politeness, of course. And not at all because she makes him laugh like no woman ever has.

Maggie Black has never quite belonged-not in drawing rooms, not in London, and certainly not stranded at an inn with a duke. Trading stories about their very different lives and discussing books over bad stew and too much brandy late at night isn't a good idea for a spinster traveling without a chaperone. But it's hard to resist a man who's both familiar and frustratingly handsome-especially when he hangs on her every word as if she were the only woman in the world. Somewhere between road delays, accidental confessions, and a scandalously intimate stop in a bookshop, Maggie finds herself falling for the one man who absolutely cannot be hers. Because dukes don't marry poor bluestockings with a passion for books and a tendency to argue...or do they?