My next read is Heather Cullman's For All Eternity. I loved the sequel, which I read first. It dealt with the villain in this one.
Blurb:
"When a beautiful, spoiled heiress' life is turned upside-down, she flees London seeking help from her great-great uncle. When she learns he will not return to his estate for a month, she has no choice but to take a job as a maid in a country manor. Little does she know the manor is owned by the parents of the man whom she refused to marry months before. When he unexpectedly shows up, he recognizes her and gives her an ultimatum--keep working, or he will reveal her secret which could land her in jail! But the longer she stays, the harder it is to deny another secret...her growing love for the handsome nobleman."Posted later...
Ok, I finished For All Eternity and I'm conflicted. Rationally, I had too many problems with the book to be able to say I liked it, but I still enjoyed it very, very much. In a sense, my gut is saying "A" but my head is saying "C". A B seems like a good compromise.
Cullman is good at changing characters during the book. Here, Sophia was really hateful at the beginning, a shallow, selfish bitch, but she was greatly improved and almost unrecognizable by the end of the book. But here comes one of my problems: this process would have been much more believable if it had taken more than the single month it took. Another advantage of that would have been that by then Sophie would have been older than the 17 she is here (ick, by the way). Maybe I'm just wanting the author to write the book I would have written, but an interval of, say, a year, between the time Sophie leaves London and the time Nicholas finds here at her parents' house would have helped the whole plot make much more sense. As it was, I felt Nicholas forgave her much too easily and unrealistically. Ok, he saw by her actions that she wasn't quite as shallow as he'd thought, but to fall in love with her because of it? Please!
In spite of all this, it was a very sweet love story, and I adored Nicholas. He was one of those honorable, almost boring heroes that I love. The story was also quite funny at times (the 3 prospective brides for Nicholas were priceless, especially the one with the "angling aroma"!), and I devoured it in mere hours. I seem to find Cullman's style very easy to read, because I did exactly the same with her last.