Not Quite a Lady

Author: Loretta Chase
Published: April 2007 (Avon)
Category: Historical Romance
Quote of Choice: "Oh, now you are going to become all masterful. If you think you can intimidate me with your— with your great size and— and swaggering arrogance, I recommend you think again."
Rating: 10/10

Hooray! The new Loretta Chase is finally out and I loooooooooved it. The dialogue was excellent and so funny.

Lady Charlotte Hayward, at twenty-seven years of age, is an expert at NOT getting married. She's gorgeous and intelligent, but she's been guarding a deep dark secret for ten years. When she was seventeen, she was duped by a libertine and gave birth to a boy in secret, with the assistance of her very-not-evil stepmother and maid. The baby was given away, and figured that it may not have survived because it was so weak at birth. Charlotte has no desire to marry because her husband would realize that she's not a virgin and reject her and expose her for a fraud.

Darius Carsington is a gentleman scholar, studying animals, their mating habits in particular. And he regards his relations with women the same way animals do. There is no love nor desire to marry. His father, fed up with his youngest son, issues a challenge. Restore Birchwood (the estate neighboring Charlotte's father's estate) within one year or marry.

Charlotte literally trips over Darius while she's out on a walk on his property, and the two start off on the wrong foot, bickering with each other in the most amusing way. They are both determined not to be attracted to the other. Darius has a rule against innocents and Charlotte is unwilling to trust men after her experience with the man who had his way with her and left.

However, Charlotte and Darius are thrown together frequently, as her stepmother has taken on the task of restoring the manor house at Birchwood, spending money that Darius doesn't have. Every time they meet, they rub each other the wrong way, and Darius winds up having wicked thoughts about her. Every time they kiss, Charlotte is angry at him and herself, usually whacking him with her bonnet and stomping off in a huff.

They give in to the attraction one afternoon, when Charlotte is crying over the prospect of marrying a man she doesn't love, and she reveals her secret to Darius. I was ready to applaud Charlotte at that point because the TRUTH has come out before the end of the book, and she and Darius can work through it. And hooray! Darius is accepting of Charlotte's past and the fact that she's not perfect. It was nice to see the hero and heroine act like adults and communicate, and they declare their love soon after, which is lovely. So many historical romances have the heroine refusing the hero until he admits that he loves her, and that usually takes until the very end of the book.

The conflict though, is Colonel Morrell, who I kept calling "Colonel Mustard" in my mind. He wants Charlotte for his wife, but he'd be the kind of husband who doles out heaps of discipline to make her into a proper wife. None of this traipsing across the countryside and helping her stepmother redecorate a bachelor's home. Basically, he's the male character I hate quite easily. He discovers Charlotte's secret and attempts to blackmail her with it, but unsuccessfully so, as Charlotte and Darius go to her parents and reveal the truth, along with their intention to marry.

Charlotte's father isn't upset about how Charlotte had a child, but the fact that she was too afraid to tell him about her problem, and accepts his new grandson, giving the poor child a large, loving family, and lifting Charlotte's burden of guilt from her shoulders.

This was a great romance, with minimal annoyance to me (and I get annoyed rather easily!). I could not get enough of Charlotte and Darius's dialogue, as they are the epitome of "that bickering-but-in-love couple."