The Windham Series in Order

Part of the confusion is the publisher's own doing: the first three books are branded "Duke's Obsession" and the next five "The Windham Sisters", which makes the eight look like two unrelated series. They are not. It is one family, one continuous timeline, and the duke's campaign runs through all of it.

The Windham novels in order

Eight books. The brothers first, then the sisters:

1. The Heir (2010) — Gayle Windham, Earl of Westhaven, hiding from his father in his own townhouse, and Anna Seaton, the housekeeper who is not what she says she is. Establishes the duke, the family and the pressure.
2. The Soldier (2011) — Devlin St Just, the duke's illegitimate eldest, home from the Peninsular War and unfit for company. The most damaged hero in the series and the best-written recovery.
3. The Virtuoso (2011) — Valentine Windham, a pianist losing the use of his hand, sent to the country to fail quietly. The gentlest of the three brothers' books.
4. Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish (2011) — Sophie Windham, stranded in London at Christmas with an abandoned baby and a man who will not leave. A Christmas romance that is doing more work than the packaging suggests.
5. Lady Maggie's Secret Scandal (2012) — Maggie, the eldest sister and the family's other illegitimate child, hiring an investigator over a stolen item she will not describe.
6. Lady Louisa's Christmas Knight (2012) — Louisa, the bluestocking who published something she should not have, and the Scottish soldier who becomes her way out of it.
7. Lady Eve's Indiscretion (2013) — Eve, who has not ridden since an accident nobody in the family discusses, and Lucas Denning. Quiet, and the sharpest of the sisters' books on old injuries.
8. Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (2013) — Jenny, the youngest, who wants to paint professionally in a decade with no route for her to do so. Closes the family arc.

One scheduling quirk to be aware of: Lady Sophie's Christmas Wish reached shops a few weeks before The Virtuoso, but both the publisher's numbering and Burrowes's own recommended order put Valentine third and Sophie fourth. Follow the list above.

The prequels, and whether to read them first

Two novellas cover the duke and duchess's own courtship: The Courtship (2012) and The Duke and His Duchess (2013). Burrowes's own site suggests starting with them, and chronologically that is correct.

In practice most readers do better starting with The Heir. Both prequels were written after the main sequence and assume you already care about Percival and Esther as the meddling parents; read cold they are pleasant and slight, read after book three they are quietly moving. Chronology is not always the same thing as reading order.

Where Windham Brides fits

Windham Brides is a four-book sequel series following a set of Scottish cousins who marry into the family: The Trouble with Dukes (2016), Too Scot to Handle (2017), No Other Duke Will Do (2017) and A Rogue of Her Own (2018).

It reads perfectly well on its own, and a lot of people meet the Windhams there first. If you have already read the original eight, the appeal is watching the grown siblings turn into the interfering generation their father was.

What Burrowes does that nobody else does

The Windham books are unusually interested in the mechanics of a large family — who covers for whom, which sibling is trusted with what, how an illegitimate child is absorbed without ever being formally acknowledged. Two of the duke's children were born outside the marriage and are raised alongside the rest, and the series treats this as a fact of life rather than a scandal to be resolved.

The romances are also slower and more conversational than the genre average. If you want plot, look elsewhere. If you want two guarded people talking each other into the open over three hundred pages, this is the shelf.