Christine is a free-spirited widow living in genteel poverty who encounters the Duke at a house party (because it’s the Regency and that’s how they do). I did read all of Slightly Scandalous, but, despite a wonderful rake, the heroine was off-putting.Īs the family protector and a Duke, Wulfric is a very serious man weighed down by duty and propriety in a way that is everything repugnant about the antiquated notion of aristocracy fortunately, he falls for a woman who punctures that and makes him human. Wulfric (I know) Bedwyn, Duke of Bewcastle, is the eldest of six children and each have already had their story told I gave Slightly Married a try, but when I skipped ahead to page 200 to check on the action I met the sentence, “He gave her his seed,” and I was out. This is that book, but instead of digging deeper to find sexually-twisted tyrants all the way down a la Ashley, Mary Balogh shows us a deeply caring man, motivated only by love and duty.

In my (scathing and bitchy) review of Jennifer Ashley’s Mackenzie series, I wrote that the common series structure has the last book be about “the most forbidding of the men the one you can’t imagine rooting for, or whose arrogance and aloofness is nigh on insurmountable”. I generally read Balogh when nothing else is handy, but I would go so far as to say this particular book is a classic of the genre. I do not begrudge any author the chance to cash in, except maybe that 50 Shades of Twilight woman. She’s been putting out books for years and years, and with the advent of e-books will be reissuing her back catalogue for quite some time to come. Mary Balogh is a reliable and consistent romance genre author.

Slightly dangerous book