The Marriage Experiment

Trentham always comes through

The Marriage Experiment is the second book in the delightful Laws of Attraction series. We met Adriana briefly in the first book, The Courtship Calculation, and I’m glad we now get to enjoy her full story. Everything Laura Trentham writes is a winner to me, but sometimes the characters and storyline just feel extra special from the beginning and I fall right in love with them. The Marriage Experiment is one of those times. Maybe it’s because Trentham said her inspiration for this book was the song "Jesse's Girl" by Rick Springfield. Well who doesn’t love that song and wish the guy on the outside looking in gets the girl?? Whatever it is, Adriana and Dawson captured my heart and held on until THE END.

Adriana is a woman society considers too smart for her own good. What is an amateur lepidopterist, anyway, and why would any young woman want to be one instead of hunting for a husband? She is beautiful, intelligent, full of spirit and fire – and underappreciated and undervalued by society. Even though I understand how it was in Regency times and even though I read many historical romances, I always manage to get myself worked up over the way women were (mis)treated, ignored, forced to enter marriages that were unhappy, unhealthy and often unsafe merely because the men said so and it was for the good of the family, the estate, the whatever. Adriana’s father earned a fair amount of wrath from me when he acquiesced to his wife’s pressure and agreed that Adriana should marry her evil, boorish, loutish, cruel, mean (get the picture?) stepbrother Richard Pace-Verney to “keep her future secure, keep the estate in the family” and blah, blah, blah.

Adriana is of legal age and doesn’t have to agree to marry anyone, but the pressure from her father is intense, and he won’t listen to any criticism of Pace-Verney. She and everyone else always assumed she would marry her neighbor and childhood friend, Cyrus Shaw, once he grew up a bit and decided to settle down. Not a burning love there but they’d always been close and seemed to understand each other. Except things are heating up at home, Cyrus is off in another country gallivanting and getting the most out of life, just like all the other young dandies – and when she sends him an urgent plea to come home at once and marry her to save her from Pace-Verney, Cyrus doesn’t exactly jump on his horse and hurry home.

Fortunately (very, very, very fortunately as it turns out – yes, you can swoon now) for Adriana, Cyrus’s stepbrother Dawson, the new Earl of Westhorpe through the tragic loss of father and older brothers, realizes how upset Adriana is when she asks him to send her letter to Cyrus, and Dawson reads the letter. And from that moment on this story is sweet, sexy, spicy, swoony, spectacular.

Dawson is the ex-soldier, the serious one, the one who never expected to be in charge, the one who doesn’t find it necessary to do the Grand Tour before settling down. And Dawson is also the one who has always truly loved Adriana but would never have dreamt of venturing where he assumed he brother wanted to be, was meant to be. Until Cyrus doesn’t come back to rescue Adriana and it’s clear Evil Richard will stop at nothing to force the marriage and secure that estate.

So . . . Dawson and Adriana are married. He is an Earl, a neighbor, an old family friend, respected. Her father won’t object. But will Cyrus? For that matter, will Adriana? And to what lengths will Richard go to take back what he thinks is rightfully his?

Need I say more? Trentham is a master at words and emotions and scenes and action – and best of all, at romance. Watching Dawson and Adriana circle each other, and then seeing that circle become smaller and smaller and smaller as they were drawn to each other, was heart-stoppingly satisfying. I loved these characters, I loved this story, and I cannot wait for the next book in this wonderful series. Thanks to the author for providing an advance copy of The Marriage Experiment as part of her review crew. I voluntarily leave this review; all opinions are my own.