Scandal's Heiress
A Regency Romance
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Hyacinth Grey has had a quiet life in Gibraltar, managing her father's household and tutoring her young half-brother. One day, a letter arrives with the news that she has inherited a small fortune from her grandmother, an infamous courtesan. She sets sail for England with plans to found a charitable school for girls.
Thomas Pently, alias Smithson, is the nephew of a duke, but he ran away from home to try his luck in the East India Company. After a decade there, his mistress was murdered and his aristocratic family summoned him home. He's now third in line to his uncle's duchy, after his aging father and one sickly cousin.
They meet aboard the Whistler, sailing for a home neither of them really knows. Will their shipboard friendship survive London's social whirl?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith's thoroughly chaste Regency shipboard romance pairs up an English captain's daughter with an Englishman returning from India. Hyacinth Grey and her bastard half-brother, George, are traveling from Gibraltar to England when she meets Mr. Thomas Smithson. Her father has warned her away from the man, but she becomes very grateful for his assistance when he saves young George from drowning. Though Thomas and Hyacinth enjoy a drunken kiss by moonlight before they reach England's shores, Hyacinth is determined to maintain her independence when she reaches London, hoping to open a school for girls. But Thomas and Hyacinth continue to run in the same social circles while in London and he continues to pursue her. While the initial romantic encounter suggests more promising interludes between the pair, the romance seems to stall at the heart of the novel, though it picks up closer to the conclusion. The lack of spark is offset by magnetic characters and solid plotting. (BookLife)
