Lord Fenton's Folly by Josi Kilpack
Lord Fenton is a gambler, a dandy, and a flirt-and he must marry or else he will be disinherited, stripped of his wealth and his position. He chooses Alice Stanbridge for two simple reasons: he once knew her as a young girl, and she is the least objectionable option available to him. However, Alice has harbored feelings for Fenton since their first meeting ten years ago, and she believes his proposal is real. When she discovers it is not, she is embarrassed and hurt. However, a match with the most-eligible bachelor in London would secure not only her future but that of her family as well. Determined to protect herself from making a fool of herself a second time, Alice matches Lord Fenton wit for wit and insult for insult as they move toward a marriage of convenience that is anything but a happy union. Only when faced with family secrets that have shaped Fenton's life does he let down his guard enough to find room in his heart for Alice.
Excerpt
Fenton groaned and put his saucer back on the tray, making an instantaneous decision that eased his mind quite a lot. To look at every woman he met as a potential wife was irritating, and after only two weeks he was quite tired of it. Perhaps the solution was to orchestrate a match that would not lay all aspects of matrimony at his feet all at once. Perhaps treating it as a business arrangement would help it to be exactly that, thereby freeing him from all the discomfiting realities he was not yet prepared to face. "I leave for Fentonview on Tuesday and shan't be back for a week. Courting is such a boring prospect, and you yourself said that to become infatuated with anyone might become a complication." He paused, considered one last time what he was going to say next, and decided he felt as good about it as could be expected. "You like Alice Stanbridge and feel she would make a good wife for me?"
Lady Chariton looked confused and perhaps a bit concerned. "I do, but-"
"Then that is good enough for me," Fenton said, rising to his feet and smiling broadly at his mother, who stared back at him in surprise. "I do find her appealing and what's more she is not a silly little thing without a practical thought in her head."
His mother's eyes widened and her eyebrows rose upon her forehead. Fenton struck a pose of consternation, with his thumb and forefinger on his chin as he looked toward the window a moment, then nodded crisply and turned back to his mother who still looked shocked by his pronouncement.
"Yes, I think that Alice Stanbridge is exactly what I should like in a wife, and so I shall see to it before I leave for Hampshire-I see no reason to wait until Michaelmas and might as well get it over with." He leaned in and kissed his mother's hand. "Thank you for your help, Mama. I shall let you know how she responds to my proposal."
My review: You can't go wrong with this book for two reasons. Number 1, it's one of Shadow Mountain's Proper Romances, and every one of them that I have read are amazing! And number 2, this book is by Josi Kilpack and you can't go wrong with any of her books, she is simply amazing!
This book is about Lord Fenton, he was a minor character in Josi Kilpack's last proper romance A Heart Revealed (which I highly recommend you read!) This book shows off even more of his crazy personality, but I love that you also learn why he is the way he is and you are able to see that he was a human, only doing the best that he could do. Lord Fenton is a well-written character and I really loved seeing the London Season through his eyes, and I had to laugh at the lengths that he would go through simply to annoy is father. But all of that annoying gets to his father, and he ends up demanding that in order for Lord Fenton to continue to be his heir and the Lord Fenton at all, he must shape up, and one of the demands is that he must get married.
Enter Alice Stanbridge. She has had a large crush on Lord Fenton since he was kind to her when she was a child. Now during her first season, she has hopes and dreams of running into him and him realizing that he loves her and sweeping her off of her feet. But as Alice is soon to find out, dreams are not always what they seem to be. I loved Alice as well, especially at the beginning before her eyes are really opened to her situation and also to Lord Fenton's situation. There was such an innocence to her character that really lasted all through the book.
Lord Fenton chooses to marry Alice, but it's out of duty to wed, and figuring that she will be as good a match for him as any. He hardly knows her, there has been no time for him to fall in love with her. And when she finds out, that's when the fun begins. The verbal sparring between these two is a bit crazy, they both know just how to hurt the other and they really rise to new heights to do so. Until the time that they both realize just how much they need the other.
This book is an awesome specimen of Regency Romance. I love that like all of the Proper Romance books, it's completely clean and romantic. You won't want to put this book down until the very end!
I was sent an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Author Josi Kilpack
Josi S. Kilpack hated to read until her mother handed her a copy of The Witch of Blackbird Pond when she was 13. From that day forward, she read everything she could get her hands on and credits her writing “education” to the many novels she has “studied” since then. She began writing her first novel in 1998 and never stopped. Sheep's Clothing won the Whitney award for Mystery/Suspense in 207 and Wedding Cake, book twelve in the Sadie Hoffmiller Culinary Mystery series won in 2014. Josi was also the Best of State winner in Fiction for 2012. Josi currently lives in Willard, Utah, with her husband, children and super-cute - but not very friendly - cat.
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Labels: Clean Romance, Josi S Kilpack, Proper Romance, regency romance, Shadow Mountain Publishing
