I’m excited to see what Cecilia Grant does with other tropes after reading what she did with this one. The book also engages with social ideas of class and gender in a way that I haven’t really seen in romance novels before. Martha steadfastly refuses to be seduced, and Theo, while failing to get in Martha’s good graces using his usual tricks, accidentally does it anyway by the novel tack of engaging her mind and treating her first like a person. Neither one of them gets what they signed up for. He believes he will enjoy seducing the poor, uptight widow who seems to hate sex. Theo is amused and eager to take on the task Martha wants to pay him for. Enter Theo Mirkwood, Martha’s new neighbor, a carefree young man who’s just been banished to the country by his father to become responsible. So if this is going to happen, she’s going to have to secure herself a stud. Her husband was not able to have children, so she knows she’s not pregnant (even though he kept trying, and trying, much to her displeasure). Martha is tightly wound and a rule follower, so it’s a tough decision for her to make, but she goes crafty. All of that is about to be taken away from her, unless it is found that she is pregnant with an heir. Her passion is setting up a school for the tenant’s children, especially the girls, but she also sees to their welfare in other ways. Our heroine is Martha Russell, a newly widowed woman who never loved (or even much liked) her alcoholic deceased husband, but who was just beginning to relish the chance to use her newfound station to effect positive change in the lives of those who live and worked on her husband’s estate. The part of me that appreciates good characterization and realistic plotting and development was very happy with this book. It ended up being a really good read, even if the author’s refusal to give my id exactly what it wanted frustrated me. The idea of a romance novel that takes a very tropey premise and almost aggressively refuses to wallow in it intrigued me. I picked this book up on impulse after reading alwaysanswerb’s review.
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