Book picks similar to
The Lady Next Door (Signet Regency Romance) by Laura Matthews
regency
romance
historical
historical-fiction
The Duke I Tempted
Scarlett Peckham - 2018
Meticulous. Immaculate. No one would expect the proper Duke of Westmead to be a member of London’s most illicit secret club. Least of all: his future wife.
Having overcome financial ruin and redeemed his family name to become the most legendary investor in London, the Duke of Westmead needs to secure his holdings by producing an heir. Which means he must find a wife who won’t discover his secret craving to spend his nights on his knees—or make demands on his long scarred-over heart. Poppy Cavendish is not that type of woman. An ambitious self-taught botanist designing the garden ballroom in which Westmead plans to woo a bride, Poppy has struggled against convention all her life to secure her hard-won independence. She wants the capital to expand her exotic nursery business—not a husband. But there is something so compelling about Westmead, with his starchy bearing and impossibly kind eyes—that when an accidental scandal makes marriage to the duke the only means to save her nursery, Poppy worries she wants more than the title he is offering. The arrangement is meant to be just business. A greenhouse for an heir. But Poppy yearns to unravel her husband’s secrets—and to tempt the duke to risk his heart.
Wicked Becomes You
Meredith Duran - 2010
. .
Gwen Maudsley is pretty enough to be popular, and plenty wealthy, too. But what she’s best known and loved for is being so very, very nice. When a cad jilts her at the altar—again—the scandal has her outraged friends calling for blood. Only Gwen has a different plan. If nice no longer works for her, then it’s time to learn to be naughty. Happily, she knows the perfect tutor—Alexander Ramsey, her late brother’s best friend and a notorious rogue.
So why won’t a confirmed scoundrel let her be as bad as she wants to be?
Unbeknownst to Gwen, Alex’s aloof demeanor veils his deepest unspoken desire. He has no wish to see her change, nor to tempt himself with her presence when his own secrets make any future between them impossible. But on a wild romp from Paris to the Riviera, their friendship gives way to something hotter, darker, and altogether more dangerous. With Alex’s past and Gwen’s newly unleashed wildness on a collision course, Gwen must convince Alex that his wickedest intentions are exactly what she needs.
To Have and to Hoax
Martha Waters - 2020
Four years ago, they had a fight to end all fights, and have barely spoken since.Their once-passionate love match has been reduced to one of cold, detached politeness. But when Violet receives a letter that James has been thrown from his horse and rendered unconscious at their country estate, she races to be by his side—only to discover him alive and well at a tavern, and completely unaware of her concern. She’s outraged. He’s confused. And the distance between them has never been more apparent.Wanting to teach her estranged husband a lesson, Violet decides to feign an illness of her own. James quickly sees through it, but he decides to play along in an ever-escalating game of manipulation, featuring actors masquerading as doctors, threats of Swiss sanitariums, faux mistresses—and a lot of flirtation between a husband and wife who might not hate each other as much as they thought. Will the two be able to overcome four years of hurt or will they continue to deny the spark between them?
Cressida
Clare Darcy - 1977
But though in her late twenties she was still unmarried. Jilted by Captain Deverell she had never since been able to face the prospect of giving her hand to another. And now she had the reputation of a heartless, scheming flirt.The return of Captain Deverell into her life and the further heartbreaks that bar the road to happiness are the theme of Clare Darcy's latest Regency romance, the tenth in the sequence that has won her world-wide acclain as the true successor to Georgette Heyer.
One Night of Passion
Elizabeth Boyle - 2002
. .Georgiana Escott has one night to find the perfect man to ruin her and leave her with a tattered reputation so she can avoid an arranged marriage to an aging, despicable roue. With a misstep, she tumbles into the arms of the disgraced and dashing Lord Danvers. But Georgie doesn't know that the lover she has enticed to follow her into the night and the stranger she holds responsible for her misfortunes are in the same . . .When Lord Danvers find himself entangled with a tempting Cyprian, his secret mission to expose a dangerous spy goes awry. Yet once he starts to unmasked this bewitching lady, he realizes the seductress who claims his heart may be the traitor he seeks. Mistrust makes them adversaries in a perilous game—but how can he dismiss his obsession with her when one night of passion entwined their lives forever?
Miss Billings Treads the Boards
Carla Kelly - 1993
But beautiful Kate was an impoverished orphan—and her only escape from a lecherous employer's embraces was to go upon the stage. It was dangerous enough that a charming French playwright wanted her as his leading lady, and an ambitious impresario demanded that she bare her charms to an eager audience. But when a magnificent marquess, Lord Henry Grayson, proposed that she join him in a masquerade of mating in a mock marriage, Kate found that putting on an act in public could be even more perilous in private...if the act was an act of love....
The Marriage Mart
Teresa DesJardien - 1992
She knew she was no great beauty, and at the ancient age of 28 she was prepared to settle for an older gentleman, one happy to settle down and start a family of his own. Yet, one glimpse of the incomparably handsome Marquess of Rothayne put every practical plan to rout. Mary would be less than a woman if her heart remained unaffected by such a man, but more the fool for giving in to such folly!Nothing intrigued the Marquess of Rothayne more than a challenge, particularly where women were concerned. And Lady Mary Wagnall, with her quick-witted banter and forthright nature would certainly provide enough sport to alleviate his increasing sense of ennui. But as he helped to plot her course to matrimony, he began to wonder if it was to be his sworn bachelorhood which would succumb to her charming nature and lively smile!
A Lily Among Thorns
Rose Lerner - 2011
After her noble father disowned her, Lady Serena Ravenshaw clawed her way from streetwalker to courtesan to prosperous innkeeper. Now she’s feared and respected from one end of London to the other, by the lowest dregs of the city’s underworld and the upper echelons of the beau monde, and she’ll do anything to keep it that way. When mild-mannered chemist Solomon Hathaway turns up in her office, asking for her help, she immediately recognizes him from one fateful night years before. She’s been watching and waiting for him for years—so she can turn the tables and put him in her debt, of course, and not because he looked like an angel and was kind to her when she needed it most. She’s determined not to wonder what put that fresh grief in his eyes. But after a betrayal even Serena didn’t expect, she must put aside her pride and work with Solomon to stop a ring of French spies and save her beloved inn, her freedom—and England itself.
The Five-Minute Marriage
Joan Aiken - 1977
It was just a make-believe ceremony, and, in exchange, Delphie's ailing mother would receive an annuity for life. Delphie was in no position to refuse. She was already losing the struggle to support herself and her mother. But Delphie soon discovered that she was bound by law to the marriage and bound by love to more lies...
The Mannequin
S.G. Rogers - 2015
His neighbor Rosamund tries desperately to bring him back from the brink of despair, but the beastly young duke fights her every step of the way. His feelings for her deepen, and when she departs for London, he vows to regain his health and woo her properly. Unfortunately, she disappears before he has the chance.Rosamund is admired and praised as a mannequin for an exclusive London modiste, but her life is empty without the man to whom she gave her heart. Now, just when happiness seems within her grasp, jealous rivals conspire to ruin her dreams.Can a beastly duke and a beautiful mannequin ever achieve a fairytale ending?
The Convenient Marriage
Georgette Heyer - 1934
She also has a stammer. But when the enigmatic and eminently eligible Earl of Rule offers for her oldest sister’s hand – a match that makes financial and social sense, but would break her heart – it is Horatia who takes matters into her own impetuous hands. Can she save her family’s fortune? Or is she courting disaster? Witty, charming, elegant, and always delightful, Georgette Heyer – the undisputed queen of Regency Romance – brings the whole period to life with deft precision and glorious characters.
An Unmarried Lady
Anna Willman - 2011
“You don’t want a fortune and you don’t want to be married, while I should enjoy both excessively. If Great Aunt Agatha had wished to promote the marriage of a great niece, why didn’t she leave her fortune to me?” At the age of 24, the bookish and beautiful Miss Elaine Howard of Lynnfield Manor has long accepted her status as a spinster. Her life is focused on taking care of her roguish invalid father and his dilapidated estate and on preparing her younger sister Anne for her first Season. An unexpected inheritance which promises her a large fortune if she marries before her 25th birthday soon sets off a train of dramatic and comic events, which include a spate of unwelcome fortune hunters, an exchange of identities, an abduction, and a mystery around a missing family heirloom. An Unmarried Lady is a regency romance written in the style of Georgette Heyer. Its lively characters become embroiled in a plot that makes use of the thick black fog that descended upon London and the surrounding countryside in December of 1813, and also touches on events in the lives of Henry VIII, Catherine Howard and Mary Wollstonecraft.
The Stranger She Married
Donna Hatch - 2008
Desperate to save her family from debtor's prison, Alicia vows to marry the first wealthy man to propose. She meets the dashing Lord Amesbury, and her heart whispers that this is the man she is destined to love, but his tainted past may forever stand in their way. Her choices in potential husbands narrow to either a scarred cripple with the heart of a poet, or a handsome rake with a deadly secret.Cole Amesbury is tormented by his own ghosts, and believes he is beyond redemption, yet he cannot deny his attraction for the girl whose genuine goodness touches the heart he'd thought long dead. He fears the scars in his soul cut so deeply that he may never be able to offer Alicia a love that is true.When yet another bizarre mishap threatens her life, Alicia suspects the seemingly unrelated accidents that have plagued her loved ones are actually a killer's attempt to exterminate every member of her family. Despite the threat looming over her, learning to love the stranger she married may pose the greatest danger to her heart.
The Duke and His Duchess
Grace Burrowes - 2013
Five years later, they have four children in their nursery, a ducal estate to care for, ailing family members needing care, and more trouble on the horizon than even a strong marriage might endure.
The Marriage Mart
Elizabeth Chater - 1983
Her grandmother would like nothing more than to pull Athenas nose out of those useless books and marry her off to the first eligible bachelor around. When they arrive in London to fulfill the grandmothers plan of transforming Athena from a pauper to a princess, they are both in for a surprise: the only man Athena has eyes for is a man she loathes. After she shamelessly offends the Duke, Athena wants nothing more than to repairthe damage of their first meeting. But the Duke has already begun his campaign of slander against the ugly ducking. Soon Athena realizes she has blossomed into a swan. Will the belligerent Duke acknowledge her newfound beauty and the burning desire inside him or will he destroy her only chance of marriage?