Not Quite A Lady by Loretta Chase
At age 16, Lady Charlotte Hayward committed an Indiscretion after her widowed father’s remarriage, resulting in her new stepmother, Lizzie, helping her to hide her pregnancy and find her newborn son a home. In the 10 years since, Charlotte has become an expert at being the perfect kind, placid Lady without a thought in her head. No one can say an unkind word about her, and no suitor realizes he’s been so expertly handled into giving up that he never even had a chance to try. Not a one of them has a clue that she can think circles around them.
Darius Carsington is the youngest of five sons and an anthropologist. Like Charlotte, he’s become an expert at avoiding marriage and views all of humanity and society as anthropological specimens. His father, however, is having none of that, and sets forth an ultimatum: make a decrepit property in the country profitable within the year, or get married. Darius flees to the country with his tail between his legs.
Charlotte thinks Darius is a chauvinistic idiot. Darius thinks the placid cow act is a façade. He calls her bluff. She unleashes the local busybody on him. Her stepmother declares that she will renovate the house for him. Darius locks all his books in his room out of fear. Charlotte intercepts another shipment and organizes them. By title. Including by "the." Darius vows that he must kill her. Charlotte inwardly cackles. The rest of the cast smiles, nods, and stays out of the line of fire.
Granted, I may just by biased due to a certain book, but Loretta Chase has never let me down before, and still hasn’t. Her alpha males aren’t nearly as alpha as they think, and her heroines are more than clever enough to let them think they’re in charge when they aren’t. Charlotte is not intelligent because she’s an overeducated bluestocking like most heroines of the genre, but because she’s clever and knows how to think and read people. This is not about Charlotte reforming Darius and Darius "healing" Charlotte with sex, but about Charlotte forcing Darius to look past his narrow ideas of people, and Darius helping Charlotte realize that it’s ok for her to let people see who she really is. And, quite simply, Loretta Chase has some of the best wit being published today(post is much longer than when it started.)
I do have one plot quible, and that’s that SPOILER Charlotte’s son conveniently ended up in the same town as Charlotte and Darius, working in Darius’s house, and in need of rescuing. As the characters themselves remarked, it was just too big of a coincidence. END SPOILER
Darius Carsington is the youngest of five sons and an anthropologist. Like Charlotte, he’s become an expert at avoiding marriage and views all of humanity and society as anthropological specimens. His father, however, is having none of that, and sets forth an ultimatum: make a decrepit property in the country profitable within the year, or get married. Darius flees to the country with his tail between his legs.
Charlotte thinks Darius is a chauvinistic idiot. Darius thinks the placid cow act is a façade. He calls her bluff. She unleashes the local busybody on him. Her stepmother declares that she will renovate the house for him. Darius locks all his books in his room out of fear. Charlotte intercepts another shipment and organizes them. By title. Including by "the." Darius vows that he must kill her. Charlotte inwardly cackles. The rest of the cast smiles, nods, and stays out of the line of fire.
Granted, I may just by biased due to a certain book, but Loretta Chase has never let me down before, and still hasn’t. Her alpha males aren’t nearly as alpha as they think, and her heroines are more than clever enough to let them think they’re in charge when they aren’t. Charlotte is not intelligent because she’s an overeducated bluestocking like most heroines of the genre, but because she’s clever and knows how to think and read people. This is not about Charlotte reforming Darius and Darius "healing" Charlotte with sex, but about Charlotte forcing Darius to look past his narrow ideas of people, and Darius helping Charlotte realize that it’s ok for her to let people see who she really is. And, quite simply, Loretta Chase has some of the best wit being published today(post is much longer than when it started.)
I do have one plot quible, and that’s that SPOILER Charlotte’s son conveniently ended up in the same town as Charlotte and Darius, working in Darius’s house, and in need of rescuing. As the characters themselves remarked, it was just too big of a coincidence. END SPOILER