Discovering Miss Dalrymple comes out today, and I’d like to share another glimpse of the hero with you.

Alexander St. Clare might be a duke, but a very un-duke-like and awful thing happened to him when he was very young. And now that he’s found his father’s diaries, he gets to witness that part of his childhood through his father’s eyes.

Alexander drained the brandy glass, put it to one side, and picked up the diaries again. There was a hard, sick knot in his stomach. He found 1789. Found May. Found June.

He turned the pages reluctantly. June 8. June 14. His throat was tight, his shoulders were tight, his chest was tight. He forced himself to inhale, to exhale, to turn the page.

June 20, 1789. An express from Kent. Alexander is missing. The nurserymaids took him into the woods for a picnic and he was abducted by gypsies.

Alexander’s heart was beating too fast. There was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped it away and turned the page and read of his father’s hasty journey to Kent, read of men searching the woods and scouring the nearby villages. I’ve dismissed the nurserymaids, his father had written. How dare they take Alexander into the woods without my permission? And then an anguished: Where is my son?

Alexander thumbed hastily through the next few months, skipping over the details: the advertisements in the newspapers, the posters and the flyers, the search widening beyond Kent into Sussex, into London, into Hampshire.

November, December, January. And there it was:

February 14, 1790. An express from Exeter. One of my men thinks he’s found Alexander in the employ of a chimney sweep.

So, yes, this duke has been a chimney sweep’s climbing boy. It's not a secret--everyone in the ton knows what happened to him--but there is a secret buried in Alexander’s past, and it will tip his world upside down.

Fortunately his childhood friend, Georgiana Dalrymple, is on hand to help him!