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NOBODY'S ANGEL by Karen Robards

NOBODY'S ANGEL

by Karen Robards

Pub Date: May 1st, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-30677-6
Publisher: Delacorte

Hardcover debut for veteran romance-writer Robards—the titillating story, set in 1769 in the Carolinas, of a minister's daughter who falls in love with the indentured servant whom she's purchased. Susannah Redmon, a 26-year-old spinster who's spent the last dozen years acting as a mother to her three younger sisters and helping her widowed father run the family farm, decides to buy an indentured servant at a public auction. Her choice falls on Ian Connelly—filthy, starving, and suffering from repeated beatings; before he can work, Susannah must nurse him back to health. As she does, she discovers, of course, that he's devilishly handsome. Soon the formerly prim minister's daughter—in an engaging Lady Chatterley-like situation—is romping about with her bound man in a most unseemly fashion. But the plot becomes thinner and more strained when Susannah, having finally decided to marry Ian, discovers him missing from his room (left in terrifying disarray, including a bloodstained mattress). She spends weeks imagining the worst, and when she does find him—at a wharf in Charles Town— she's so overcome that she faints. She wakes to find herself on board a ship bound for England. Turns out that Connelly is nothing less than a marquis, returning home to deal with the ``enemies'' (his stepmother and half-brother) who were responsible for his plight...though there are problems still to come before the predictable happy close. A fairly enjoyable romantic read—until that heavily contrived last third.