My Lady Gloriana

Halliday’s Georgian-set historical is a flashback to a bland 1980s-style romance, replete with blanket statements—all women are duplicitous, always—and the whiplash-inducing ping-ponging of emotion. John Havilland, Duke of Thorneleigh, lusts after a widowed former guttersnipe, Lady Gloriana Baniard. Society mistakenly believes Gloriana is a prostitute, so to protect her baby’s aristocratic reputation, she hides in a village to ply her one legitimate skill: blacksmithing. Thorne wagers he will find and bed her. Disguised as a commoner, he becomes her apprentice overnight. He learns to love skilled labor, and she learns how to read and behave properly. They fall in love, but before he can propose, she discovers the bet and runs off, leaving each of them to believe the worst about the other in childish fits of pique. These themes repeat again and again, as do bouts of inappropriate sex, all while Gloriana’s circumstances become increasingly dire, until lessons are finally learned. [em]Agent: Louise Fury, Bent Agency. (Dec.) [/em]