Marry in Haste by Anne Gracie

Posted May 2, 2017 by Sally in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

Marry in Haste by Anne GracieMarry in Haste on May 2, 2017
Pages: 316
Format: eBook
ASIN: B01KGZVT5S
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four-stars
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From the award-winning author of The Summer Bride comes the first in a charming new historical romance series where marriages of convenience turn into true love matches.

Major Calbourne Rutherford returns to England on the trail of an assassin, only to find he’s become Lord Ashendon, with the responsibility for vast estates and dependent relatives. Cal can command the toughest of men, but his wild half-sisters are quite another matter. They might just be his undoing.

When he discovers that Miss Emmaline Westwood, the girls’ former teacher, guides them with ease, Cal offers her a marriage of convenience. But strong-minded and independent Emm is neither as compliant nor as proper as he expected, and Cal finds himself most inconveniently seduced by his convenient wife.

Emm knows they didn’t marry for love, yet beneath her husband’s austere facade, she catches glimpses of a man who takes her breath away. As pride, duty and passion clash, will these two stubborn hearts find more than they ever dreamed of?

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I LOVE Historical Romance and especially a marriage of convenience.

Marry in Haste had great writing, great characters, strong women, a sexy hero, humor, and a very small amount of angst.

Miss Emmaline Westwood, the smart, strong and proud heroine, accepts the handsome Major Calbourne Rutherford’s offer of marriage and financial security in return for her help in guiding and controlling his “wild” sisters.

Cal’s version of married life is a scary one as far as he’s concerned.

He couldn’t imagine living a settled, domestic life in a quiet corner of England, having dull meetings with estate managers, going over account books, talking to tenants about repairs and leaking roofs.  And drainage.  And sheep.  Or the even duller duty of sitting in Parliament listening to long and dreary speeches.  And worse—having to make them.  Cal shuddered.

What a dreary look at marriage.  Not surprising as Cal is a military man and has never been in love.

Emm thought she was in love once, but now she tries to steel her heart against the reoccurrence of any such feelings.

Oh, he was as handsome a man as ever she’d dreamed of—handsome, and strong and powerful.  But he was so…businesslike.  There wasn’t a romantic bone in the man’s body.  Though why she should dream of romance when she was six-and-twenty and should be beyond that…They were schoolgirls’ dreams.  Or spinsters’.  Romantic and unrealistic.  Pure Fantasy.

I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Emm to trust a man she hardly knew in order to secure her future.  She was smart and brave.  The women in Cal’s family, young and old, were hilarious.  Their feelings jumped off the pages.  Cal’s sisters, beneath their hard exterior, longed for their brother to love them.  Unfortunately, it was an emotion he had to learn and who better than Emm to teach him?

The story didn’t drag its feet and the secondary characters were wonderful.  The main characters evolved naturally in order to have their HEA.  The banter was great, and everyone spoke his or her mind when necessary instead of keeping it to inner dialogue.  I also enjoyed reading from the secondary characters’ points of view.  This was book 1 in the Marriage of Convenience series by Anne Gracie and I look forward to reading the upcoming books in this series.

four-stars

About Anne Gracie

I’ve always loved stories. Family legend has it that I used to spend hours playing in the sand pit, with a dog on either side of me and Rocka the horse leaning over me, his head just touching my shoulder, while I told them stories. I have to say, dogs and horses are great audiences, apart from their tendency to drool occasionally. But people are even nicer.

In case you imagine we were a filthy rich horse-owning family, let me assure you we weren’t. The horse period was a time when my parents entered a “let’s-be-self-sufficient” phase, so we had a horse, but no electricity and all our water came from the rain tank.

As well as the horse and dogs, we had 2 cows (Buttercup and Daisy and one of them always had a calf), a sheep (Woolly,) goats (Billy and Nanny) dozens of ducks, chooks, and a couple of geese, a pet bluetongue lizard and a huge vegie patch. I don’t know how my mother managed, really, because both she and Dad taught full time, but she came home and cooked on a wood stove and did all the laundry by hand, boiling the clothes and sheets in a big copper kettle. Somehow, we were always warm, clean, well fed and happy. She’s pretty amazing, my mum.

Once I learned to read, I spent my days outside playing with the animals (I include my brother and 2 sisters here) and when inside I read. For most of my childhood we didn’t have TV, so books have always been a big part of my life. Luckily our house was always full of them. Travel was also a big part of my childhood. My parents had itchy feet. We spent a lot of time driving from one part of Australia to another, visiting relatives or friends or simply to see what was there. I’ve lived in Scotland, Malaysia and Greece. We travelled through Europe in a caravan and I’d swum most of the famous rivers in Europe by the time I was eight.

This is me and my classmates in Scotland. I am in the second front row, in the middle, to the right of the girl in the dark tunic.

Sounds like I was raised by gypsies, doesn’t it? I was even almost born in a tent –Mum, Dad and 3 children were camping and one day mum left the tent and went to hospital to have me. But in fact we are a family of chalkies (Australian slang for teachers)- and Dad was a school principal during most of my life. And I am an expert in being “the new girl” having been to 6 different schools in 12 years.The last 4 years, however, were in the same high school and I still have my 2 best friends from that time.

No matter where I lived, I read. I devoured whatever I could get my hands on — old Enid Blyton and Mary Grant Bruce books, old schoolboys annuals. I learned history by reading Rosemary Sutcliffe, Henry Treece and Georgette Heyer. I loved animal books — Elyne Mitchell’s Silver Brumby books and Mary Patchett and Finn the Wolf Hound. And then I read Jane Austen and Dickens and Mary Stewart and Richard Llewellyn and Virginia Woolf and EF Benson and Dick Francis and David Malouf and Patrick White and Doris Lessing and PD James and…the list is never ending.

This is me posing shamelessly on a glacier in New Zealand.
This is me in Greece with my good friend Fay in our village outfits. The film went a funny colour, but you get the idea. I’m the one in the pink apron.

I escaped from my parents, settled down and went to university. To my amazement I became a chalkie myself and found a lot of pleasure in working with teenagers and later, adults. I taught English and worked as a counsellor and helped put on plays and concerts and supervised camps and encouraged other people to write but never did much myself. It took a year of backpacking around the world to find that my early desire to write hadn’t left me, it had just got buried under a busy and demanding job.

I wrote my first novel on notebooks bought in Quebec, Spain, Greece and Indonesia. That story never made it out of the notebooks, but I’d been bitten by the writing bug.

And then I discovered Romance and … the rest is…. historicals…

Rating Report
Plot
four-stars
Characters
five-stars
Writing
five-stars
Pacing
four-half-stars
Cover
four-stars
Overall: four-stars

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