The Beast and The Bookseller

Table of Contents Content Warning Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Acknowledgments About the Author Discover more romance from Entangled… Four Weddings and a Duke The Last Lord Standing Earls Rush In An Earl to Remember This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Copyright © 2023 by Eva Devon. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher. Entangled Publishing, LLC 644 Shrewsbury Commons AveSTE 181Shrewsbury, PA 17361 [email protected] Amara is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC. Edited by Erin Molta, Lydia Sharp, and Liz Pelletier Cover design by LJ Anderson/Mayhem Cover Creations Cover photography by Period Images PabloUA/Getty Imagesollallya/Deposit Photos ISBN 978-1-64937-248-2 Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition June 2023 At Entangled, we want our readers to be well-informed. If you would like to know if this book contains any elements that might be of concern for you, please check the book’s webpage for details. https://entangledpublishing.com/books/the-beast-and-the-bookseller For you. You always have my back and I am eternally grateful. And as always, for Mr. Devon and my three boys who are my wonderful why’s. Chapter One Miss Elizabeth Sharpe had never met a duke. But it seemed she was about to. And in unpleasant circumstances. She stared down at the small missive that her father had hidden away in his chaotic and rather messy office at the back of the bookstore. She had been in search of documents regarding a large book purchase. And she’d found a stack. Documents containing concern at first, and then ever-growing warnings. From the Duke of Montrose. The words were scrawled in a bold, determined hand across the ivory paper. They were in a great deal of trouble. The note was quite terse. Mr. Sharpe, I am deeply disappointed with your behavior as of late, though I am loathe to leave my townhouse. As you know, I shall be in attendance at the bookshop at 10 am on the 11th of April. You will greet me, and we shall sort this out. Tradition must be met, but if you cannot uphold your bargain, I shall have to seek out other avenues. Other avenues. She felt her stomach turn and spin inside her. Elizabeth glanced to the clock. Two minutes. The duke would arrive in two minutes, and her father was nowhere to be seen. He had gone out the night before, as he did so often now, but he had not returned. A circumstance that was growing more and more common as of late. What the blazes was she going to do? She resisted the urge to whirl around as she struggled to catch her breath. Instead, she raised her hand and touched the small crocus pin near the throat of her simple gown, desperately hoping the action of touching something of her mother’s would calm her. The bookshop had been her home all her life. She adored its nooks and crannies. Its strange little quirks. Its myriad shelves that she had spent days organizing in new ways, since her father had given up taking care of the shop after her mother’s death. Rows and rows of beautifully bound books lined every surface. Usually, the sight lifted her heart, no matter how difficult things seemed, but now her heart was pounding with such rapidity she feared it might pound right out of her chest. She stared at the stack of books she’d been about to shelve, trying to steady her nerves. It was a wonderful collection on the burgeoning subject of archaeology and the events around the discoveries of ancient sites in the country of Egypt. It was a difficult but rewarding text, for it detailed all that was happening there. She had mixed feelings about the archaeologists, who seemed to think that stealing was the same as collecting history. Still, the printed pictures were mind-boggling. She’d never left London, let alone gone to another continent, and the books allowed her such an escape. She wished she could escape at this particular moment. She swung her gaze to the few clients who were gazing at the books on the shelves, trying to decide on possible purchases or items that they might put on a list for future days. Biting the inside of her cheek, she forced herself to take stock. She was not prepared to see a duke. Quickly, she ran her hands down her rather boring gown and then up to her hair. She knew she was tidy. She was tidy all the time, but she no doubt had a fine sheen of dust upon her from when she had cleaned earlier. She swung her gaze back to the clock. One minute left. And then… The ticking sounded as loud as the clattering of the horses’ hooves and carriages that coursed down Fleet Street. Her father was not here. What am I supposed to do? And the duke was unyielding in his tone! Had her father forgotten? Or had he escaped into his cups as he so often preferred, leaving her to clean up his messes? The duke was coming to see Mr. Sharpe, not Miss Sharpe. It didn’t matter that she all but ran the shop now. The weekly arrangement of her father going to the duke’s townhome to deliver books had been happening as long as she had been alive and certainly longer than that, for their family had been selected by the Duke of Montrose’s family to be their exclusive purveyor of books. And they had been doing