BOOK REVIEW: Someone to Care by Mary Balogh

I’m a sucker for Mary Balogh’s Regency Romances, most recently the Westcott Novel series (starting with Someone to Love.) The latest addition to the series is Someone to Care.

Miss Viola Kingsley was, until two years prior, a countess – the wife of the Earl of Riverdale. At least, she thought she was. Upon the earl’s death, Viola discovered the marriage had been bigamous. Her children are illegitimate and were disinherited. The family circled the wagons and supported one another, so the scandal has more or less faded for the others affected by the earl’s deception. But not for Viola. After a christening party held for a grandchild, Viola snaps. Needing time for herself, she flees.

She isn’t particularly clear on where she wants to go, but the decision is taken out of her hands when her hired carriage breaks down in a small country village and she is forced to wait overnight for it to be fixed. There she comes across an old acquaintance, Marcel Lamarr, who is now the Marquess of Dorchester.

Marcel is a widower, but his wife died in an accident many years earlier. His response was to immerse himself in a life of pleasure-seeking debauchery.

Fourteen years earlier, Marcel had tried to begin a flirtation with Viola, but she, then a virtuous young wife, sent him on his way. When she enters the country inn where he has also been temporarily detained by a transportation mishap, memories of his past attraction come flooding back. He approaches Viola to renew the flirtation.

This time, Viola succumbs. Why not? They spend a lovely day together, followed by a night of passion. In the morning, they decide to run off together for a fling, both recognizing that this is to be temporary.

Naturally, they fall in love. Following some of the usual conventions of Regency Romance, they miscommunicate and pride keeps them from being honest with one another. Before they can part, they are found out in their love nest and, doing the honorable thing, Marcel announces that they are betrothed. For the rest of the novel, they try to wriggle out of the betrothal even though marriage is clearly where they need to be heading.

Sometimes, plots that follow this track get annoying because the hero and heroine just behave stupidly. But Mary Balogh has a talent for writing sympathetic characters that tug at the heartstrings so you can forgive them for making a muddle of things. In addition, she usually twists convention enough that the typical romance plots feel fresh. In Someone to Care, Viola is forty-two years old! Marcel is just shy of forty. A regency romance featuring "middle-aged" lovers with the woman older than the man? Someone to Care is a heartwarming romance and I continue to follow this series avidly.