Series: The Widow Rules, #2
Traits & Tropes: childhood friends; soldier; hero has a permanent limp; widowed heroine with a baby; marriage of convenience
Publication Date: 04.26.22
Genre/Setting: Historical; Regency; London/Portsmouth, England, 1815
Heat Level: 2.5
Rating: 3/5
About to give birth to her late husband’s child, Constance Lysander learns that he was actually married to two other women and has left her with no money apart from her family business which he was unable to take. She’s grateful for the support of her aunt and the two other wronged women who have now become her dearest friends, but she must marry to save face in the eyes of society.
Jonathan Eaton, the Earl of Sykeston, has just returned from war scarred and with a debilitating limp. He’s not the man Constance grew up with, preferring to hide away at his estate and avoid society, but when she says she needs him to marry her, he’s there for her. His strong feelings for her have never abated, but he’s determined to keep his heart locked down to protect both himself and her from any pain.
When Constance and Jonathan finally find themselves living under one roof, the heartache they’ve both suffered causes problems for them right away, but the attraction and connection between them is strong and their relationship has the potential to become so much more than the convenient alignment it started out as.
I really wanted to love this book so much more than I did. Typically, scarred or tortured heroes are my absolute catnip, but Jonathan was kind of a pill. I think mainly his brooding just went on way too long and his reasons for pushing Constance away didn’t make much sense, neither did his reasons for leaving for war in the first place, and his inner monologues about his fears and reasons to keep Constance at a distance just became repetitive for me very quickly. I was so looking forward to an emotional scarred hero redemption story and I just wound up feeling bored instead. I think Constance put up with too much ridiculousness from Jonathan but also gave him too hard of a time in other ways. He definitely needed a large shove back into life, but I didn’t care for the fact that one minute she was encouraging him to confide in her and telling him that they would face any challenges that arose together as a team and in almost the next thought, she’s talking about her shipbuilding company’s problems and how she’s not going to tell Jonathan because she’d rather deal with them on her own. Yet, she couldn’t see how she also needed to work on things herself to make their marriage better.
I think a lot of times Jonathan was emasculated and Constance wasn’t as sensitive to that or helpful in those terms as she could’ve been. A lot of his issue was his loss of pride and sense of self-worth as a man and she and her friends didn’t always help with that. Much of his improvement and ultimate handling of his PTSD issues and taking back of his life occurs off page and with him separated from Constance and while I understand why his character needed that time to work on himself, I’m still not sure why she couldn’t have also been a part of it and been there to help him more. It also still doesn’t quite make sense to me why he was so determined to be indifferent to Constance; yes, he’d been betrayed and let down by others but not by her or even a woman, so I just never really got the source of his turmoil beyond trying to protect her unnecessarily and I think that made his behavior seem more repetitive to me.
I did like this book much better than its predecessor, but I still find this almost instantaneous friendship between these three women who were married to the same man to just be so odd and cringy. Also, I’m sure this is just me and will be an unpopular opinion, but I could’ve done with way less cooing over the baby. I think that has everything to do with where I am in my personal life, but she is mentioned a lot, and it got old fast for me. I think Constance and baby Aurelia might actually have more page time together than Constance and Jonathan did, so I think this definitely was something that hurt the romance for me. It didn’t help that they had this dark cloud of a potential enemy hanging over the whole story and it could’ve easily been avoided if these two had gotten together and talked everything out and used their heads to realize that the situation didn’t quite make sense.
On the whole, I think Jonathan’s surliness was a bit overdone and Constance’s portrayal as this super mom who works all the time, likes cleaning, has time to play with her baby, and somehow still has energy for sex was off-putting to me. I’m not sure if this made me dislike her exactly, but I wasn’t as prone to rooting for her as I thought I’d be. I also never understood why Constance even married Meri in the first place. She’d been in love with Jonathan and talked about how she couldn’t really find anyone she wanted to marry so she just settled for Meri. Why? She had her own business which, if anything, would’ve been enticement not to marry, and she never mentioned a strong desire for children as a motivation, so I just didn’t really get it.
Basically, this was by no means a bad story, it just wasn’t quite the pining scarred hero story I was wanting. I was bored by the near constant three steps forward, two steps back nature of the relationship between Constance and Jonathan as they were each insensitive to the other’s feelings and insecurities. I also think Constance’s friends mostly just made the situation worse and we got too much of their interactions as meaningful dialogues when I’d have rather seen that between her and Jonathan, rather than most of the relationship development and character growth seeming to occur off page. Nonetheless, this is still something I think is worth reading and I’ll continue on to Beth’s story.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
https://www.bookbub.com/reviews/1251414029
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4067404240
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