The Wicked Ways of a Duke

The Wicked Ways of a Duke is a historical romance by the American writer Laura Lee Guhrke, published in 2007 and part of her Girl-Bachelors series.

Prudence Bosworth has spent years supporting herself with needlework and reading romances, and the inheritance that arrives from a father she never met comes with a condition: she has to wed within the year. She is determined to marry for love rather than to the highest bidder, and having seen Rhys de Winter, the Duke of St Cyres, behave chivalrously at a party, she decides he is the only candidate worth considering. What she does not know is that the duke is a fortune hunter, which is the engine of the book: he needs a wealthy wife and she is looking for a man who wants her, and the two of them go into the same courtship with different questions. Guhrke writes the series about women who have to earn their own way.

It belongs to a set of novels about London women who support themselves by working, and the same mixture of tradespeople and aristocrats appears in the others.