The Bridal Quest

Once again, another fun read from Candace Camp. I love her stories because her heroines aren't helpless; they tend to be a little older, a little caustic, with lots of spunk. Irene is no exception: she won't get married because she doesn't want to “belong” to a man the way her mother belonged to her abusive father.

The hero in this book is great, too. Gideon doesn't really want to get married, he's doing it because he's expected to. The twist on the familiar trope is that he's marrying so his children, should he have any, will have more legitimacy, being that he has been the lost heir for the last, oh, twenty years. When Gideon meets Irene, of course they argue. He's rich because he worked his way up from being an abandoned child in London. She's rich because she was born to it. Their sensibilities, however, are very similar, even if their modes of expressing them are different.

Read this book for a hero who looks bad but isn't, a heroine who tells herself she won't ever marry, and a little mystery about how the hero came to be the lost heir returned.