The daughter of the marquis of Brandenburg, Lady Sophie York is a beguiling and flirtatious innocent. One of the most marriageable young women in Regency London, she's also secretly brainy. Yet she finds herself in love with a man she is dead set against loving: Patrick Foakes, a handsome rake. Sophie has determined never to marry, since her father is a notorious philanderer who constantly humiliates Sophie's mother with his flagrant pursuit of Frenchwomen. Sure that Patrick will always be a libertine, she turns him down when he asks for her hand. She then accepts the proposal of his stodgy friend, Lord Slaslow. Patrick is stunned-a little relieved, but mostly stung: the proud lothario has fallen for Sophie. After Patrick adopts a disguise as a favor to Lord Saslow, the fiery pair are thrown together. They find they can't resist each other, so they bed and marry. But each has separate, unspoken fears-she of his assumed infidelity, he of her early death from childbirth-that puts them at cross-purposes, until tragedy strikes. James (Potent Pleasures) proves herself a notable chronicler of the genre here. Her spritely tale takes on substance with a subplot about events in the Ottoman Empire. In addition, while the customary hallmarks are in evidence-the breathless, drawn-out sex scenes; the misunderstandings that almost ruin everything-these contretemps flow naturally from the characterizations and plot, and contribute to an engaging story.
A reviewer from USA Today wrote of Eloisa's very first book that she "found herself devouring the book like a dieter with a Hershey bar"; later People Magazine raved that "romance writing does not get much better than this." Eloisa wrote her first novel after graduating from Harvard, but alas, it was rejected by every possible publisher. After she got an M.Phil. from Oxford, a Ph.D. from Yale, and a job as a Shakespeare professor, she tried again, with much greater success. Currently she teaches Shakespeare in the English Department at Fordham University in New York City. She's also the mother of two children and, in a particularly delicious irony for a romance writer, is married to a genuine Italian knight.
