Duke of Eccess — Mariah Stone

They call her the Mad Heiress. But the maddest thing she ever did was fall for a duke who makes her forget she swore never to belong to any man.

On the day she's supposed to be safe in her hiding place until Christmas, a reckless duke racing through London's streets nearly tramples her to death.

She should run. She should disappear back into the shadows where the "Mad Heiress" belongs.

Instead, Lady Agatha Temperance Hale lets Octavius, Duke of Eccess, hire her as governess to his three impossible wards -- never telling him she's the woman half of London is hunting with a fifty-pound reward on her head.

Her stepmother wants to steal her inheritance and lock her in an asylum for her "unnatural" experiments with electricity. Her cruel step-cousin wants to force her into marriage. All she needs is to hide until her twenty-first birthday on Christmas Day, claim what's hers, and disappear forever.

What she doesn't need is to fall for her devastatingly seductive employer.

Octavius lives for excess -- the finest wines, the most dangerous pleasures, anything to numb the ghosts that haunt every Christmas season. But this impossibly large, beautiful man feeds her strawberries in candlelight, shares his deepest wounds, and makes her crave things a proper spinster should never want.

When he kisses her in his secret pleasure room, she knows she's lost.

When his enemies become her allies and his house becomes her home, she knows she's doomed.

Because the closer Christmas comes, the more impossible it becomes to choose between the independence she's fought for and the love that could destroy them both.