Callie Hutton, $3.99, ISBN 978-1386691402
Historical Romance, 2017
Callie Hutton’s For the Love of the Marquess is one of those stories that is as long as it is because the hero and the heroine are both terrible in communicating important details to one another.
It all begins with Graham, the Marquess of Hertfort, and Juliet, our heroine, have an agreement. He wants to pop that question to her father—no, no, silly, he wants to marry her, not her father—but she asks him to wait until after her older sister’s wedding just because.
Alas, just when he has the chance to do so, an urgent request of a nature that he can’t reveal, as it involves his guardian’s daughter ending up in a delicate condition, shall we say, and Graham is asked to accompany Amy to France until the problem goes away some nine months later. So, he leaves a note to Juliet saying he’d need to be away for a bit.
“For a bit” ends up being eight months, and now, he is back and is tad surprised that Juliet is miffed at his disappearing act. I can’t say I blame her. Sure, they don’t have email back in those days, but he couldn’t at least send her a letter with some convincing lie about why he was detained?
Yes, he’s sworn to secrecy as to why he went MIA for eight months, but come on, he can’t come up with a white lie? Is “being honest” more important than winning his beloved back?
The rest of the story sees him trying to win her back by doing convoluted half-stalking, half-something stunts so that he is everywhere she goes, and these two dance around one another so much that I want to scream.
The story would have ended quickly if he would just make up some story about being a secret agent on a mission abroad. Why not? Nine out of ten noblemen in England are spies, after all, according to the romance genre.
Instead, these two just go round and round, indulging in their weird and increasingly dull game of charade, and all I can think of is that these two must be super bored to spend so much time playing these silly games, all the while lacking the intellectual capacity to conjure more entertaining ways to fill their time.
The author’s narrative style isn’t bad at all, mind you. I could have really enjoyed this story if the author had come up with a better, or at least less lame-brained, romantic conflict for her characters here. As it is, Graham and Juliet have only succeeded in making me feel like they have wasted my time as much as they have wasted theirs.
