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The year is 1725. Lady Gloriana Baniard is a beautiful fish out of water. Brought up on the mean streets of London, she is a brash, blunt, obscene force of nature. But thanks to a brief marriage to a disgraced aristocrat, she is forced to live with his noble family and endure the humiliating process of learning proper ladylike behavior.
Rebelling, she runs away to Yorkshire, where she intends to be a blacksmith, a skill at which she excels. She knows she’ll need a manservant to front for her. When John Thorne appears, she hires him, stirred as much by his irresistible attraction as by his strength.
John Havilland, Duke of Thorneleigh, is an arrogant, indolent gambler and womanizer. Having seen Gloriana just once, he yearns to make her his own. When he learns she has run away from her family, he makes a wild bet with his wastrel companions—he will find the lady and bed her. Disguised as a humble servant, he becomes her assistant, learning the blacksmith trade. The clash of wills between these two proud people creates more sparks than a blacksmith’s anvil. As Gloriana learns to be a lady, Thorne learns humility—and desire deepens to love . . .
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 1, 2018 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781626818750
- File size: 1365 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781626818750
- File size: 1926 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 12, 2015
Halliday’s Georgian-set historical is a flashback to a bland 1980s-style romance, replete with blanket statements—all women are duplicitous, always—and the whiplash-inducing ping-ponging of emotion. John Havilland, Duke of Thorneleigh, lusts after a widowed former guttersnipe, Lady Gloriana Baniard. Society mistakenly believes Gloriana is a prostitute, so to protect her baby’s aristocratic reputation, she hides in a village to ply her one legitimate skill: blacksmithing. Thorne wagers he will find and bed her. Disguised as a commoner, he becomes her apprentice overnight. He learns to love skilled labor, and she learns how to read and behave properly. They fall in love, but before he can propose, she discovers the bet and runs off, leaving each of them to believe the worst about the other in childish fits of pique. These themes repeat again and again, as do bouts of inappropriate sex, all while Gloriana’s circumstances become increasingly dire, until lessons are finally learned. Agent: Louise Fury, Bent Agency.
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