Rose Ashford

She had been wanted in the dark. She had never once been wanted in the daylight. Charlotte Dawson arrives at Colwick Manor in a wet October with ruined boots and a scandal she did not earn. One gentleman's lie has already cost her a position, a name, and any claim to respectability. She wants nothing now but a roof, a wage, and a household where no one knows what she is supposed to have done. What she finds is two clever, grieving children who have driven out four governesses-and their father.
Nicholas Croft, Earl of Colwick, buried a brother in Spain and a wife three years after. He has spent eight years mortaring the walls. He does not laugh, he does not hope, and he has no intention whatsoever of being argued with by a soaking-wet young woman who informs him she applied for the post of governess. But walls come down by inches. Through one Kentish winter-a storm, a sickroom, a green silk gown at a county assembly, a stone bench in a walled garden-Charlotte and Nicholas find the one thing neither of them can afford.
Then the man who ruined her walks into the hall as a guest. Nicholas promises her that when he comes for her, it will be in the daylight, in the open, before them all. Keeping that promise will cost him everything he has been hiding behind. And Charlotte will learn that the daylight is not a thing any man can give her. She will have to walk out into it herself. A slow-burn about grief, grace, and the difference between being wanted and being chosen.
Guaranteed happy ending.