The Fencing Master's Daughter

He has spent his life commanding ships. She has never once lowered her guard.

Cheltenham, summer 1817. Miss Marguerite "Daisy" Duval is twenty-seven, comfortably on the shelf, and the most scandalous woman in the spa. She keeps her late father's fencing school on Cambray Street, teaching schoolboys and gentlemen the foil, while half of Cheltenham sends its sons to her and the other half crosses the street.

Captain Sir Simon Blundell, RN, has spent more than twenty years at sea. Now he has a new baronetcy, a stiff knee, a headstrong seventeen-year-old niece, and no idea what to do with any of them. When Mary slips away to Daisy's salle, Simon storms in to forbid it. Daisy hands him a foil. He fights like a man boarding a ship. She touches him three times without once being touched.

"Madam, you would have been dead in a boarding action."
"Sir, you would have been dead in mine."

He comes back. First to glower from a chair at Mary's lessons, then, coat off, to learn properly. Daisy reads everyone by their guard, and she finds the captain's is all bluster over a lonely man who has never had a home on land.

But a charming speculator wants her building for his grand new hotel, and he means to have it by fair means or foul. When scandal empties her school and Simon tries to protect her without asking, Daisy must face the whole town in a public bout against a famous London swordsman. And she must decide whether a woman who has always stood alone can let someone stand beside her.

The Fencing Master's Daughter is a clean, standalone Regency romance of wit, swordplay and a love that arrives late and is all the sweeter for it. It has a heroine who says "touché" when she loses an argument, a hero who has to learn to ask instead of command, and one kiss in an empty fencing school at dawn.

Reader note: a clean, closed-door romance with one kiss; a swindler's scheme, a public fencing bout, and two grown-up leads who had stopped expecting love. Standalone with a full happily ever after.

★ A lady fencing master and a Navy captain ★ She beats him in Chapter One ★ A Cheltenham summer of spa walks, balls and scandal ★ A smiling swindler ★ A public bout against London's finest ★ Love that comes later in life ★ One kiss at dawn ★ Clean and standalone ★