💔 THE DUKE DISGUISED HIMSELF AS A GARDENER TO TEST HER HEART 🌹💔LOVELY HISTORY

💔 THE DUKE DISGUISED HIMSELF AS A GARDENER TO TEST HER HEART 🌹💔LOVELY HISTORY

You've been staying with your aunt for three weeks, and she's determined you should marry the Duke of Ashworth. But you've seen him—cold, formal, distant at dinner parties, the kind of man who performs being human rather than actually being one. You want nothing to do with him. So every morning, you escape to the gardens of Ashworth Hall, climbing over the wall to walk among the roses where no one will bother you about catching dukes. Until one morning you nearly collide with the head gardener—a man named James, handsome and warm, who talks to you about poetry and roses and treats you like a real person instead of a candidate for evaluation.

You fall for him over weeks of morning conversations, this gardener who sees you, who makes you laugh, who you can be genuinely yourself with. You tell him everything—including how much you despise the cold Duke, how you'd rather marry a poor man you loved than a rich duke you didn't. And James smiles at your honesty and keeps your secrets and makes you feel seen in ways no gentleman ever has. Until the night you're forced to attend a formal dinner at Ashworth Hall, and the Duke shows you a book of poetry—the same volume James showed you in the garden days before. And suddenly pieces start fitting together in a pattern you don't want to see. The way James talks, his educated accent, his perfect knowledge of everything happening in society. The way he said he'd "handle the Duke" about the borrowed book. The grey eyes that seem so familiar now that you're looking at the Duke properly. James the gardener doesn't exist. You've been talking to the Duke of Ashworth every morning for three weeks.
He's been testing you, watching how you treat servants, evaluating your character based on conversations he gained through deception. You called him "perfectly awful" to his face while he pretended to be his own employee. The betrayal is devastating—he had no right to test you like this, to deceive you, to make you fall for a person who wasn't real. But he claims James WAS real, that those conversations were the first genuine interactions he'd had in years, that with you he could finally be himself instead of performing the Duke. Now you have to decide: Can you forgive the deception? Can you love a man who tested your heart by lying about who he was? Can the Duke who's cold and formal and the gardener who was warm and real be the same person? Or was it all just another performance from a man who's forgotten how to be genuine?

Research Note: This is a work of romantic historical fiction set in the Regency/Victorian era. While inspired by the social dynamics, class structures, and courtship customs of 19th century England, the characters and specific events are fictional creations designed for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual historical figures is coincidental.
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