BOOK REVIEW: How Not to Marry a Duke by Tina Gabrielle

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

This entertaining (I read it in a single day) new Regency Romance, How Not to Marry a Duke by Tina Gabrielle, utilizes the fake courtship trope.

Daniel Millstone, the Duke of Warwick, has retreated to one of his properties, a small country manor, to get some work done. It’s the height of the Season and he really should be doing his ducal duty by finding a wife and siring an heir. But his interest lies elsewhere – with his inventions and tinkering with the inventions of others. 

Lady Adeline Cameron is his new neighbor. The half-sister of the Earl of Foster, an old nemesis of Warwick’s, Adeline has moved into a cottage deeded to her by her father. The cottage is in need of repair, but Adeline is determined to make the best of it. She is a skilled healer and wants to devote her talents to helping the villagers. She also wants to escape from Foster’s machinations. He is in debt to a moneylender who will forgive the debt in exchange for her hand in marriage.

Warwick and Adeline meet when he comes to complain about her noisy dogs. The mutual physical attraction is instantaneous, but between Warwick’s complaints and Adeline’s defensiveness, they find one another annoying. Nevertheless, when Warwick sees Adeline being threatened by Foster, he announces that she will not marry the moneylender because he is courting her.

Later, the two cook up a plan to pretend to be courting until the end of the Season. The moneylender will give up and marry another girl. And Warwick will have a reprieve allowing him to work and avoid marrying for another year. However, they have to convince the ton, particularly Adeline’s stepbrother and Warwick’s godmother, that the courtship is real.

Warwick and Adeline are not old-style typical hero and heroine. Warwick’s scientific endeavors and Adeline’s medical skills and non-aristocratic parentage (her father was an earl but her mother was the daughter of an Arabic rug merchant) make them unusual in the eyes of society.

Of course, during the course of the pretend courtship, they will fall in love. The course that this romance takes and the chemistry between them makes this story work. The requisite sex scenes, typical heat-level for the genre, are held until the later parts of the book.