Marry in Scandal Series: Marriage of Convenience #2 on April 3, 2018
Goodreads
Buy on Amazon
Buy on Barnes and Noble
Buy on iTunes
Buy on Kobo
Available on Google Play
I will never tire of Historical Romances, especially when the plot is a marriage of convenience.
Lady Lily Rutherford finds herself in a position to be rescued by well-known rake Edward Galbraith. After her rescue, rumors fly threatening Lady Lily’s reputation and he may be a rake, but Edward does have honor and would never be able to move on while Lily’s life is ruined.
Lily is aware of her feelings for Edward, as her hero-worship has turned to love. Edward on the other hand knew he would have to marry someday, it is his duty to provide an heir after all, but never entertained the notion of actually loving his wife.
Edward knows that Lilly wanted to marry for love, but the predicament his rescue put her in, doesn’t leave room for fantastic notions of romance and a happily ever after, at least not in his mind. Out of respect for her, he needs to make clear what their marriage would be:
He sat on a stiff little chair opposite her.
His palms were damp. “There are several things I want to make clear before I er, put the question to you.”
“Go Ahead.”
“This arrangement, if you agree to it, will be an arrangement, a marriage for practical reasons—you understand?”
“A convenient marriage?”
“Yes.” He was relieved she understood. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry for what?”
“That you won’t be able to do as you’ve always wanted—that there isn’t time for you to meet a suitable young man, be courted and fall in love.” There. He’d said it.
“Because of the scandal.”
“Yes. You and I know there is no basis for the gossip, but it is the way of the world. A woman’s reputation is based on what others think and say she did, not what she actually did.”
Horrible that a women’s life was run by her reputation, though men had to worry about their honor, it never compared.
With her family in full support of whatever decision she made, Lily agreed to marry Edward. With her marriage to Edward, she took on the task of helping him fight the demons that kept him from returning to his childhood home, feeling worthy of her love and loving her in return.
As in the first Marriage of Convenience novel, the secondary characters were wonderful. The Jane Austen quotes throughout showed that author Anne Gracie is a fan of her own genre. There’s just no way to go wrong with an homage to Jane Austen. I cannot wait to see if George or Rose are next!
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 |
|
| Characters |
 |
| Writing |
|
| Pacing |
 |
| Cover |
|
| Overall: | |
Leave a Reply