Free The Lady Always Wins by Courtney Milan Page A

tulips. And she came down the aisle, slowly, to stand before him.
    He could scarcely breathe.
    And then, she gave him a smile—a long, slow, mischievous smile that brought him back from the heavens opening up to angelic choirs. By the time the vicar made his way through the meandering ceremony, he’d remembered again and again why he most loved her—why nobody else had ever been able to complete him as she had.
    And so when he spoke his vows, he didn’t just blurt them out. Just because the words were part of a sacred ceremony didn’t mean that they couldn’t be part of a game, too.
    “With
this
ring,” he said, as solemnly as he could manage. “I thee wed.”
    The emphasis was intentional. He hadn’t consulted her on the ring. He hadn’t even so much as made mention of it, and she’d simply trusted the details to him.
    She should have known better. He pulled out a ring with an entirely too-realistic beetle on it, large, ostentatious stones set like bulbous orbs in its head. Her eyes widened.
    To give her credit, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t even pull her hand away. She just met his eyes in a silent dare:
If you put that thing on me, so help me, I will…
    Just because he’d put her first didn’t mean he couldn’t tease her a little. He’d practiced hiding the real ring in the palm of his hand for days. He slipped the weight onto her finger, and when she took her hand from his, she found he’d placed a single, perfect gold band on it instead.
    Her only response was a faint, relieved huff and a twitch of her lip.
    With one raise of her eyebrow, she let him know that he’d won this round—but that she’d be back for more. A lifetime of more.
    Simon could hardly wait.

Thank you!
    Thanks for reading
The Lady Always Wins
. I hope you enjoyed it!
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    If you’d like to read an excerpt from
The Duchess War
, the first full-length book in the Brothers Sinister series, please turn the page.

The Duchess War: Excerpt

    The Duchess War
    available now
    Miss Minerva Lane is a quiet, bespectacled wallflower, and she wants to keep it that way. After all, the last time she was the center of attention, it ended badly—so badly that she changed her name to escape her scandalous past. Wallflowers may not be the prettiest of blooms, but at least they don’t get trampled. So when a handsome duke comes to town, the last thing she wants is his attention.
    But that is precisely what she gets…
    Excerpt from Chapter One:
    R OBERT B LAISDELL, THE NINTH D UKE OF C LERMONT, was not hiding.
    True, he’d retreated to the upstairs library of the old Guildhall, far enough from the crowd below that the noise of the ensemble had faded to a distant rumble. True, nobody else was about. Also true: He stood behind thick curtains of blue-gray velvet, which shielded him from view. And he’d had to move the heavy davenport of brown-buttoned leather to get there.
    But he’d done all that not to hide himself, but because—and this was a key point in his rather specious train of logic—in this centuries-old structure of plaster and timberwork, only one of the panes in the windows opened, and that happened to be the one secreted behind the sofa.
    So here he stood, cigarillo in hand, the smoke trailing out into the chilly autumn air. He wasn’t hiding; it was simply a matter of preserving the aging books from fumes.
    He might even have believed himself, if only he smoked.
    Still, through the wavy panes of aging glass, he could make out the darkened stone of the church directly across the way. Lamplight cast unmoving shadows on the pavement below. A pile of handbills had once been stacked against the