Spotlight & Giveaway: Second Duke’s the Charm by Kate Bateman

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Kate Bateman’s new release: Second Duke’s the Charm

Meet Her Majesty’s Rebels: three brilliant women who run King & Co., London’s most exclusive investigative agency…

The wedding-night death of her much older husband left Tess Townsend the Dowager Duchess of Wansford—and still a virgin. Now she and her two best friends investigate London’s most scandalous crimes, and while Tess longs to experience physical pleasure for herself, she can’t risk losing her treasured independence…

Cynical shipping magnate Justin Thornton never expected to inherit a dukedom, but he’ll do his duty. When the ravishing woman he kissed at a party turns out to be the Dowager Duchess, Justin sees an obvious solution: a marriage of convenience that will suit them both.

But the passion that sparks between them is anything but convenient. As Tess works on a new case at the request of Queen Charlotte, her increasingly suspicious behavior makes Justin question her motives—and her past. The infuriating woman clearly can’t be trusted, but Justin doesn’t believe in love, so there’s absolutely no danger of him falling for his own wife…is there?

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from Second Duke’s the Charm 

From Second Duke’s the Charm by Kate Bateman. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Chapter Two
Hinchcombe Park.

“This is a terrible idea.” Tess made a desperate grab for the leather strap above her head as the carriage bounced along the rutted driveway. “The worst.”
“It was your idea,” Daisy reminded her. “And it’s not the worst. Remember the time Ellie disguised herself as a fishwife to catch that man who’d abducted his cousin? That was the worst.”
Ellie gave a theatrical shudder. “I still have nightmares about the smell.”
“Well, it’s definitely second-worst,” Tess muttered. She tugged at the scandalously low-cut bodice of her gown, but her breasts still jiggled above the lace like two of Mrs. Ward’s blancmanges. “I look like a harlot.”
“We all look like harlots,” Daisy said happily. “That’s the point. How else are we going to get into this disgraceful event? And how else are you going to persuade some handsome-yet-morally-lax stranger to seduce you?”
Tess groaned. “I said I wanted someone to kiss me, not seduce me. I can’t risk doing anything that might leave me in an ‘embarrassing situation.’ ”
Daisy grinned. “There are plenty of wonderful things you can do that won’t result in a child, I promise.”
Ever since Daisy had described in glowing detail her own first amorous encounter with Tom Harding, the cheeky stable hand who’d worked at Hollyfield, Tess had been burningly curious to discover physical pleasure for herself. But she was caught in a terrible dilemma.
As a widower, everyone assumed she’d had a physical relationship with the duke. If she took a lover from among the rakes of the ton, the secret of her virginity might be revealed. The resulting gossip would put her in a difficult position regarding the other wives and widows of London. They’d treated her as one of their own, included her in discussions no virgin should ever have heard.
Tess would be labeled an impostor. A brazen, shameful hussy who’d bent society’s rigid rules and pretended to be worldlier than she really was.
Becoming a social pariah would not be beneficial for the work she did at King & Co.
She, Daisy, and Ellie had started the investigative agency a few months after the old duke’s death. Since women with vocations were generally treated with disdain and suspicion in the ton, Tess had suggested that they operate under a male pseudonym. “Charles King, Esquire” was entirely fictitious. The three of them were King & Co.’s sole employees, not that many of their clients were aware of the fact. Whenever anyone asked to see the notoriously elusive Mr. King, they were told he was “out following a lead.”
King & Co.’s headquarters—a handsome brick building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—had been one of the first purchases Tess had made with her widow’s portion, and the satisfaction she’d felt on signing the deeds, that heady rush of independence, had gone a long way to lessening her guilt about the lies she’d told to get there.
Their first “case” had been to help Cecelia Talbot, an old school friend. Cece had lost her necklace while kissing a “gentleman” at a party, and the cad had been trying to blackmail her into marriage by threatening to send it to her father as proof of their “affair.”
Tess had lured the blackmailer into a maze at Vauxhall. Instead of the kiss he’d been expecting, he’d been greeted by Daisy’s loaded pistols, and a lengthy speech from Ellie reminding him that blackmail had been considered a capital felony instead of a misdemeanor since the case of R. v. Jones in 1776. As such, it was technically punishable by transportation to Australia—if not the death penalty outright—and that Ellie was quite prepared to ask her father to pursue a prosecution on Cecelia’s behalf.
This information had been enough to scare the miscreant into returning the necklace the following day, and to take an extended tour of the Greek Islands “for his health.”
After that, business had flourished. They’d gained cases through whispered word-of- mouth recommendations and a few newspaper advertisements, and now King & Co. was known for dealing with “sensitive matters” for London’s fashionable elite with the utmost discretion and remarkable success.
Professional satisfaction, however, was not the same as physical satisfaction. It had been almost two years since her disastrous marriage, and Tess still had what Daisy called “an inexperience problem.”
Her situation was uniquely challenging. If Tess took a lover, she risked falling pregnant, and the gossip she’d heard suggested that methods of prevention were notoriously unreliable. Any child of hers would be obviously illegitimate, and it would be cruel to subject an innocent to the inevitable stigma and disadvantages of such a position.
She couldn’t choose another husband either. Marriage would mean losing the income she received from the duchy and handing control of her person and her finances to a man who might forbid her to continue her investigative work.
That would never do. There was a mortgage to pay on the property at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Ellie and Daisy relied on their salaries for their own limited independence.
The only way Tess could ever marry again would be to find a man as rich as the old duke, whom she could trust implicitly. A man who would love her enough to allow her to make her own decisions.
Since solvent, attractive, trustworthy gentlemen were notoriously thin on the ground, she’d resigned herself to a lifetime of widowhood.
But not to a life of complete celibacy.
The solution, the three of them had decided, was for Tess to become someone other than the Duchess of Wansford for a night. As an incognita, a masked woman with no name and no morals, she could find a handsome stranger and do a little “passionate experimenting” without fear of discovery.
According to Daisy, Hinchcombe Park was the place to do it. Tom Careby’s masquerades were notorious for their licentiousness.
Still, Tess was having second thoughts. “I should never have suggested this.”

From Second Duke’s the Charm by Kate Bateman. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Excerpt. ©Kate Bateman. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

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Meet the Author:

Kate Bateman, (also writing as K. C. Bateman), is a bestselling author of historical romances, including her RITA® nominated Renaissance romp, The Devil To Pay, the Bow Street Bachelors series (This Earl of Mine, To Catch an Earl, and The Princess and the Rogue), along with the novels in the Secrets & Spies series (To Steal a Heart, A Raven’s Heart, and A Counterfeit Heart). When not writing novels that feature feisty, intelligent heroines and sexy, snarky heroes you want to both strangle and kiss, Kate works as a fine art appraiser and on-screen antiques expert for several popular TV shows in the UK. She splits her time between Illinois and her native England. Follow her on Twitter to learn more.

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