The Duchess in His Bed

June 24, 2019
Unfortunately, Heath’s Victorian-era follow-up to the riveting The Scoundrel in Her Bed has a slow, formulaic plot. The recently widowed Selena Sheffield, Duchess of Lushing, is in dire straits because the duke’s vast properties will revert to the Crown unless she can produce a son with sufficient rapidity to claim that her husband fathered the child. Hoping to get pregnant in a hurry, she visits Aiden Trewlove’s private London club for noblewomen, seeking the owner himself. Aiden and his siblings, all illegitimate, were tossed away by their noble father and raised in poor conditions. But unlike his siblings, he has no desire to marry back into the aristocracy, striving for business success instead. Beautiful Selena tempts him, as his secretly produced son could be a future duke. In previous Sins for All Seasons novels, Heath brought together couples who were already acquainted; perhaps this entry seems colder because Aiden and Selena are essentially strangers and get to know each other slowly and without real chemistry. Even series fans will find this a disappointment.

July 1, 2019
An aristocratic widow in need of a baby propositions an infamous club owner in the fourth Sins for All Seasons novel. Aiden Trewlove, one of the many illegitimate children of an unethical earl, never intends to risk pregnancy with any woman. So when Selena, the Duchess of Lushing, arrives incognito at his Elysium gambling club, he feels an electric attraction but only imagines a brief affair. Her bold request to sleep with him, however, conceals a plan that will test his strongest principle. While her motive elicits sympathy for her and the financial vulnerability of women, particularly Victorian ones, her targeting of Aiden is discomfiting, as it is based on self-serving assumptions similar to ones associated with sex workers. Their insta-lust, which is meant to make more palatable her rush to get him into bed, does not improve the plot. When she confesses her true intentions out of guilt, Aiden agrees to join in her scheme for reasons boiling down to low self-esteem. Though secret baby plots are fairly common, this novel isn't sold on its own premise, and the compressed duration of the relationship makes it hard to believe in the romance even by the genre's flexible standards of realism. Heath (Scoundrel in Her Bed, 2018, etc.) tries to counter this with long passages of each protagonist's point of view and the couple's sexual encounters, but this only pads out an idea that might have been better suited to a novella. Selena's siblings, who drive her actions, seem like outlines, as do Aiden's (though the latter are familiar figures in the series). Aiden's biological parents fare no better even though they have distinguishing traits, serving mainly as plot devices to prolong the suspense of how the couple will conquer the alleged hurdle to their happiness. The epilogue only makes the barrier look even more of a straw man in hindsight. A story of marrying status to wealth to consolidate one's immediate family's advantages.

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August 1, 2019
Aiden Trewlove has built a very successful business at the Elysium Club, providing women with what they most want in life. However, when Lady Selena Sheffield shows up at Aiden's establishment, he refuses to give her what she desperately desires: one night with him. Aiden has always maintained a firm and fast rule of never entertaining his club's clients, and when he discovers the reason Selena wants him to be her temporary lover, he is even more determined to resist her amorous appeals. However, the more time Aiden spends with the intoxicatingly beautiful Selena, the more tempted he becomes to break his business rule just this once. The fifth stunning installment in RITA Award-winning Heath's (The Scoundrel in Her Bed, 2019) Victorian-set Sins for All Seasons series beautifully showcases this author's gift for crafting potently sensual romances graced with an appealing cast of beautifully rendered characters and a richly detailed historical setting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)