WHEN A STRANGER LOVES ME

Author: Julianne MacLean ISBN: 9780061456855 2/2009 HISTORICAL Publisher: AVON
Time Period: Victorian, 1870s

I saved his life... and I had much to demand in return. When he washed up on shore, I knew my prayers had been answered, and that I, Lady Chelsea Campion, need no longer fear poverty and heartbreak. To secure my family's estate, all I needed was a child. Handsome, clearly noble-born, and with no memory of his previous life, the mysterious man was perfect. All I had to do was visit his bedchamber and seduce him. I had expected him to be a skillful, scandalously wonderful lover, but once in his arms I was overcome by something more than mere passion. I had fallen hopelessly, desperately in love. My plan has gone shockingly awry. But I will not give up a man who makes me feel such wicked ecstasy. No matter his true identity, no matter the secrets he struggles to remember, I will do anything in this world to make this stranger love me.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Julianne MacLean sets her historical romance, WHEN A STRANGER LOVES ME (Pembrook Palace Book Three), on the Isle of Jersey in the 1870’s where Lord Blake Sinclair has washed up—naked, wounded, with total amnesia. He’s rescued by Lady Chelsea Campion (a woman whose reckless behavior cast her from society seven years prior) living secluded with her mother, with her brother and sister-in-law visiting. She’s just received word from her brother’s heir—a 60 year-old lecherous money grubber—that he wants her to marry him. Her brother Sebastian has yet to produce progeny and their estate will fall to the old coot if something should happen to him. Chelsea’s mother insists Chelsea owes her family this duty. Chelsea hatches a hare-brained scheme to seduce the handsome stranger as soon as his wounds are healing, get pregnant, and then travel to Switzerland with Sebastian and his wife to give birth and pass off the baby as her niece/nephew. Too bad she didn’t count on falling in love with the man or consider that he might have a wife back home.

MacLean has a true gift for describing her settings and characters, for Jersey is almost as much a character as the people in the story. She portrays Blake’s frustrations regarding his life brilliantly. To not know if he loves or is loved, unable to recall the slightest thing about himself other than the feeling that some great duty or responsibility has befallen him, he starts life anew and discovers that he likes to draw, that he enjoys the outdoors and that he loves Chelsea. The sting of betrayal when he finds that her seduction was a rash attempt to get with child, blows up in her face when Blake’s family arrive to take him home and memories rush back—including that according to his father’s latest will (written shortly before he lost all of his marbles), he and his brothers must all wed by Christmas or forfeit their vast fortune to an horticultural society. Now Blake insists Chelsea marry him if she is indeed pregnant, thus eliminating her ability to give Sebastian and his wife the baby they’ve always wanted.

WHEN A STRANGER LOVES ME is steamy, tragic, funny, desperate and romantic, all rolled up in a mystery. I love how simple life becomes when memories of the past are all washed away, yet how horribly complicated it becomes when the parallel lives of an amnesiac are forced back together. What survives this purging of the old and unwanted life merged with the rediscovered truths and the newly acquired passions is a bolder, stronger, more fulfilling vision for Blake and his bride. I definitely need to go find the first two novels in this series and can’t wait for the fourth. Readers who like to consider thorny moral issues will relish WHEN A STRANGER LOVES ME.

Susan Barton