Move Heaven and Earth

Lord Rand Malkin has a problem: traumatized by the horrors he witnessed in the Napoleonic Wars, he is unable to walk. Despising himself as a useless cripple, he is determined to end his life--but he can't bring himself to commit suicide until he succeeds in bedding beautiful Sylvan Miles, the spirited nurse hired to care for him by his brother the duke. Sylvan, though, is plagued by scandal: Eager to escape her social-climbing nouveau-riche father, she, too, had joined the war effort to nurse wounded soldiers--only to be branded a whore by society for her efforts. Shunned and reviled, she sees the Duke of Clairmont's job as her salvation. But Clairmont Court, she soon discovers, is no safe haven. Her new home is stalked by both a troubled ghost and a mysterious prowler who brutally assaults the local women. And Rand himself, cantankerous and rude, is no prize--even if he is devilishly attractive. Dodd's (The Greatest Lover in All England) breathless narrative style only adds to the confusion generated by this setup, and readers may at times feel lost and bewildered, but Sylvan is a charming and admirable heroine, and her relationship with Rand is charged with well-wrought and electric eroticism. (Aug.)