THE EARL CLAIMS A WIFE

Author: Cathy Maxwell ISBN: 9780061350993 10/2009 HISTORICAL Publisher: AVON
Time Period: 1810 England

She'll be his perfect wife . . . Preoccupied with fighting Napoleon and making love to his mistress, Brian Ranson has ignored his wife since their wedding. But now that he's become the Earl of Wright, he's ready to fetch his bride back to London. He's shocked to find she's become a bold, beautiful woman, exactly the kind he lusts after . . . and she wants nothing to do with him. Gillian, Lady Wright, is desperate to seize the love she's been denied . . . but not with her rakish husband! So she makes a bargain—for thirty days she'll be the perfect wife, then he'll set her free. But no matter how she hardens her heart against her damnable earl, her body begs her to surrender . . .

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Cathy Maxwell’s THE EARL CLAIMS HIS WIFE is a fabulous Regency romance that kept this reader turning the pages until the wee hours of the morning. The day after I read the book, I was bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, but I was completely happy at having been so fully entertained.

Gillian loves Brian, but on their wedding night he announces that he doesn’t love her, doesn’t intend to be a real husband to her, and that he does, in fact, love his mistress. He leaves her, heads to war, and that seems to be that. Gillian turns out to be more than a mousy, love-struck bride, and during the years that Brian is away she becomes her own woman. When Brian returns to claim her, needing Gillian for his own purposes, he finds she is involved—to an extent—with a Spaniard and does not wish to continue their sham of a marriage. She wants him to petition Parliament, dissolve their union and set her free.

I love it that Gillian and Brian strike a bargain. It amuses me to no end that he behaves unexpectedly, showing up in her carriage when she thinks he’s ridden ahead, climbing trees to gain entrance to the room at an inn she has locked him out of and generally showing himself to be more hero than cad. This is a true love story, and the delightful part is that the reader is privy to every bit of the pair’s finally falling in love.

Cathy Maxwell has certainly outdone herself with THE EARL CLAIMS HIS WIFE. It is fantastic!

Kay James