The Slothful Duchess's Secret Harvest
By @john1208
Zofina Vodya, a brilliant but chronically lazy agronomist, wanted nothing more than a quiet life. When she wakes up in the body of a powerless duchess, cast aside by her husband for a barren patch of land on the Empire's blighted frontier, her dream of peaceful retirement seems impossible. Faced with starvation and rebellion, Zofina reluctantly uses her modern knowledge of crop rotation, soil science, and irrigation to turn her desolate fiefdom, the Vodyan Marches, into an unexpected breadbasket. Her stunning success attracts the attention of Kaspian Volkov, the country's wealthiest and most ruthless merchant, who sees in her not a wife, but an asset of unimaginable value. As their reluctant partnership blossoms into a slow-burning romance, Zofina finds herself drawn deeper into the politics of a dying empire. But the engineered famine she fights has a purpose, and its creator isn't a monster, but a desperate man with a terrible choice. Can a woman who only wants to be left alone find the will to save a world she never asked to be a part of?
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