REISSUED: 12/2005
GENRE: Historical Romance
SETTING: England, 1822
AUTHOR SITE: link
MY GRADE: A+
SYNOPSIS: He first spies her in the shadows outside a London theatre, a ravishing creature forced to barter her body to survive.
To the woman known simply as Fleur, the well-dressed gentleman with the mesmerizing eyes is an unlikely savior. And when she takes the stranger to her bed, she never expects to see him again. But then Fleur accepts a position as governess to a young girl…and is stunned to discover that her midnight lover is a powerful nobleman. As two wary hearts ignite—and the threat of scandal hovers over them—one question remains: will she be mistress or wife?
MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS: This is very dark, deep and well-written. A fiction novel has never made me cry, until this. The end of chapter 26, to be exact, a scene not involving hero or heroine. The story spans two years. Most of it takes place at Adam's estate.
Fleur Hamilton (Isabella Bradshaw) is on the run. She's twenty-three, with red hair and brown eyes. Her second cousin, Matthew Bradshaw, Lord Brocklehurst, is blackmailing her over something that has to do with why she's run away. He also wants to marry her but I don't think it's to get his hands on the money that she's due to inherit from her deceased parents.
The hero is Adam Kent, Duke of Ridgeway. He's very likable but too beta. I'd have liked to have seen more passion from him. Instead he's pretty reserved. Adam is physically scarred on his face and body from fighting in the Battle of Waterloo and was even presumed dead at one point. He has dark hair and eyes and "hawkish" features. He's in his early thirties and has been married to twenty-six-year-old Sybil for six years. They have a daughter, five-year-old Pamela. He's fallen out of love with his wife, who hates his guts, and she's still in love with his younger half-brother, Thomas Kent, and has been since before they married. She's in bad health, is unfaithful, and is truly a miserable person and undeserving of a devoted husband and daughter, or a devoted anybody.
The romance between Isabella and Adam is a slow burn and I didn't feel much angst considering they couldn't be together for quite awhile. It took far too long for Isabella to even stop being scared of Adam. Her fear of him made no sense at all. There was a part near the end when Isabella received a letter from someone. I felt she should have sent a reply that expressed all she'd been feeling and how she feels about what was written in the letter, but she didn't and that bugs me.
I really like a bit of suspense in historical romance so I really enjoyed the subplot, if it can be called that, with Thomas/Sybil, and with Matthew/Isabella, though I wish more had been done with Matthew at the end. He deserved some sort of punishment. Though the book is long, 400 pages, I can't think of anything that should have been cut from it. The story never dragged and I never got bored.
The 2005 reissue is somehow longer in length from the 1991 original though no content has been changed.
