LADY BE BAD

One brother makes her bored, and the other makes her bad.

Lady Eleanor Howlett has waited too long to indulge a love match—her sister ran off and married her dancing instructor, so now Eleanor’s stuck marrying for respectability. Her father, the Duke of Marymount, has picked out Lord Carson, heir to the Marquis of Wheatley, who has agreed to the marriage in order to salvage his family’s finances. After she responds to his proposal with a bold request for more time as a single woman, the dull but kind Lord Carson remains so focused on keeping his estate intact that he delegates their courtship to his family's scandalous second son, Alexander. Alexander’s courtship on his sibling’s behalf soon makes it clear, to Eleanor as well as her younger sisters, that she’s been promised to the wrong brother. Behind the respectable facade of their public visits together, the couple works through Eleanor's secret list of ways to be bad, promising they will give it up before the wedding, but with each adventure, that seems increasingly improbable. The first entry in Frampton’s new series, The Duke’s Daughters, is as entertaining and spicy as her earlier romances; avid readers will especially enjoy scenes of Alexander watching Eleanor translate erotic Italian literature in the secret back room of Avery and Sons Booksellers. Eleanor is a picture-perfect headstrong heroine, and with Alexander the epitome of a rake to match her, their happy ending is a welcome addition to the Regency shelves. Readers will look forward to seeing whether Eleanor’s three sisters can find such suitably improper matches in future books.

Adventures abound when a lady and her lord decide to be bad together.