Yet another story in the long-running Pennyroyal Green series by Julie Anne Long. (Although apparently the one after this is the long-awaited finale to the series.) It's not bad, but the character of the hero didn't really work for me. He's supposed to be a bad-tempered, uncontrollable, vase-throwing bastard who frightens and drives away all the servants of the house where he's staying, but this never materializes in his interactions with the heroine or the other servants in the house. In fact, he's a fairly standard-issue upper-class male of the time period throughout most of the story, with a tendency to dish out put-downs with sarcasm. The heroine is great and her son is very well characterized as a small boy.
The picture on the book's cover, unfortunately, has nothing to do with the book. The heroine is always dressed as a housekeeper, in old and extremely modest dresses, and never in a ball gown, she is very fair-skinned with a tendency to blush, and the story takes place in a country manor house, not a palace with a vast hall as pictured on the cover. Maybe the picture is supposed to represent the story's villain ...
