| Reviews: |
|
wildhart (USA: LA) (2010/02/06):
Margaret Huxtable has given her youth in order to keep her promise to her dying father to hold the family together until her sisters and brother have grown up. She gave up the chance to marry Crispin Dew, the man she loved, and suffered the pain of learning that he married someone else. But now her siblings are grown up, and her sisters are married. She is thirty years old and has decided that it is time she married too since the alternative is to be a spinster sister dependent upon her brother and sisters for the rest of her life. She knows whom she will marry. The Marquess of Allingham has asked her several times over the past few years, and each time she has refused. Now she will accept. She has made that decision before setting off for London and the Season. But in London she meets the now-widowed Crispin again and she learns a painful truth about the Marquess of Allingham - just after salving her pride with Crispin by telling him that she is betrothed. She finds herself in an embarrassing situation at Lady Tindell's ball, the first she attends. And then, as she flees the ballroom in near-panic, she collides with the very notorious Earl of Sheringford. Duncan Pennethorne is the Earl of Sheringford, but his is only a courtesy title. While his grandfather, the Marquess of Claverbrook, lives, Duncan is dependent upon him. And his grandfather has just cut him off without a penny five years after terrible scandal banished him from London and polite society. For private reasons of his own, Duncan is desperate for money and the home he has always considered his own. And so he returns to London to plead with his grandfather. There is only one way out for him. He must marry someone respectable, someone of whom his grandfather approves, before the marquess's eightieth birthday -- which happens to be in two weeks time. There is no time to lose. Duncan attends the very first ball following the ultimatum, though he has not been invited. He is desperately looking over the likely matrimonial prospects when someone who is not looking where she is going collides with him. One might call it fate...
|
