Layton was excellent at bringing quietly stated emotional realism to the Regency romance genre, and she wrote brilliantly about what it means to be tied to someone you barely know in the aptly named To Wed a Stranger. She returned to that theme here, for a story about the ups and downs of a convenient marriage. Unfortunately, it's much less successful this time, primarily because of a hot mess of a hero.Ian is a bankrupt lord who needs to find an heiress. "Find me a bride that can speak coherently and knows her place" he instructs his man of business. "Find me one I can bear to look at and talk to, if only for the time it takes to get my fortunates back in tune again." Sounds like an arrogant snobbish asshole, no? But the Ian who meets milller's daughter Hannah is almost unfailingly kind and complimentary to her and makes nothing of the discrepancies in their social standing. Of course, Hannah doesn't know he's thinking things like this: "He'd have to make love to her eventually. It wouldn't be an onerous task when he did." Oh, that's big of you Ian. After the marriage he feels free as a bird, looking forward to dumping his wife in the country while he enjoys London, but you'd never know it from how he treats her. It might have all worked if Layton had simply put some transitions in to make sense of the disparity between the public and private Ians. But she didn't; at best he seems utterly hypocritical, at worst to be hiding either a split personality or an evil twin. I liked Hannah, who accepts Ian not for his title but because she was cruelly dumped and doesn't want to give up on having a husband and a family. She's a warm, vulnerable and passionate person and she deserves better.
