the Night Duke's Harbour Fell: A Novel of Crown Commission

A flood breaks open a warehouse door-and five years of buried lies come with it.Briony Thack has spent five years proving nothing. Not to the county, not to the Commission that dismissed her father as a granary-keeper who couldn't keep an honest count, and not to herself-until the night the sea-gate breaks, and the grain spilling into the flood is wrong. Too light. Too old. Exactly the kind of wrong her father once tried, and failed, to make anyone believe.Rhys Ashgrove, Duke of Merrow, was nineteen when he signed away an innocent man's whole life on a trusted steward's word alone. He has spent every year since telling himself it was routine. He can't tell himself that anymore-not with the woman he pulled from a collapsing stair standing in front of him with a scale, a jar of grain, and a five-year-old grievance that refuses to stay buried.What Briony uncovers in the ruined warehouse is bigger than one dishonest steward and one dead man's name. It is a decade of quiet theft dressed up as disaster, spun across four harbour towns by a man the whole county still loves-a man Rhys has called family since before he can remember.As the evidence mounts-a falsified ledger, a suspiciously well-timed fire, a nephew's frightened confession-Rhys must choose between the comfortable silence that has protected him his whole life and the harder, costlier truth Briony has never been allowed to stop chasing. And Briony must decide whether a Duke who is only now learning to be brave is a man she can finally trust with anything at all.THE NIGHT THE DUKE'S HARBOUR FELL is a slow-burn historical romance wrapped around a fraud investigation with real teeth-told in alternating points of view, closed-door, and built for readers who want their Duke to earn his redemption one honest ledger at a time.- A wrongly-accused heroine who finally gets to be believed- A guilt-ridden Duke choosing courage over comfort- A slow-burn, closed-door romance with real emotional stakes- A fraud-and-justice mystery that widens with every chapter- A small coastal town with more to hide than one bad stormSome wrongs don't stay buried. Some men don't stay comfortable. And some scales, once balanced, change everything.