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HaBO: Naughty Naughty!

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Jessica writes

I read this in 1996ish. I dont remember the publisher, but I’m pretty sure
it wasnt a category. The cover featured a swooning, brunette woman, possibly
in a blue dress, in the arms of a well-endowed man. Both are tastefully
dishelved, and of course, the bosoms are heaving.

Okay, so I think the time period is the late 19th century and the heroine
is a headstrong American heiress whose name might be Amanda. She has a
brother (she gets a crash course in sex after seeing him with one of the
maids in the stables—naughty!), a dead father, and a domineering mother.
They have a mansion in Newport, and her mother hosts a party in order to
thow her at the hero: an honest-to-goodness English duke! He’s poor and
needs to marry an heiress, so the mother is ecstatic, but Amanda wants
nothing to do with him and accidentally says so in the duke’s hearing. This
makes the duke decide that she would perfect for him.

Stuff happens, then Amanda goes to Paris with her aunt Zoe as a chaperone.
And what a coincidence, the duke is there too! Not that Amanda cares. In
fact, she winds up meeting a dreamy French artist and has sex with him!
Repeatedly! But then he gets sick (TB or something) and orders her to stay
away for her own safety. But she’s headstrong, so she goes anyway and gets
kidnapped and held for ramsom. Her aunt turns to the duke for help, and he
saves Amanda.

Here’s where it gets good (if I’m remembering this correctly): the duke
knows that she was sleeping with the artist, but he doesn’t care. He
doesn’t get upset, or call her a slut—he just thinks, huh thats a little
surprising, and shrugs it off. He and the aunt then arrange a quicky
marriage to protect her from the scandal of being victimized. I think the
duke even arranges her to visit her sick lover before they leave Paris.

I’m pretty fuzzy on what happens afterwards. I think they honeymoon on the
French Riviera, and I remember Amanda being presented to all of the duke’s
staff in England, but I don’t remember how everything resolved into the
happily ever after.

This book didn’t get me hooked on romance immediately—that came later
with a vengeance—but after reading my share of crappy romances with alph
asshole “heroes” (Catherine Coulter’s cream-toting douches come to mind .
. .), this one has come to stand out in my memory as something special. So
hopefully someone else remembers this.

Whoa. WHOA. Someone has to remember this – and how on earth did this not sell you on romance for the rest of your reading life?!

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  1. Ros says:

    Oh, I hope someone knows this because I totally want to read it!

  2. Nat says:

    GAH. I wrote this on the wrong post. Sorry.

    I don’t read romance unless there are explosions, car chases, headless zombies and/or Japanese swords.

    But I want to read THIS! Someone, please find this book. Please.

    My captcha: youre49. How did you…Hey!

  3. Edie says:

    Velvet Dreams by Patricia Werner??
    Blurb
    “Amanda Whitney’s mother is determined to marry her fiercely independent daughter off – preferably to a title. But Amanda harbors dreams of romance, and vows she will only wed for love. Edward Pemberton, the Duke of Sunderland, has sworn off love forever. He is short of funds, and has come to America, quite simply, to marry an heiress. They couldn’t be more wrong for each other. Yet he is irresistibly intrigued by her spirited beauty and she finds his rakish charms impossible to resist. Form the gilded ballrooms of New York to the magnificent estates of Newport, from the dazzling salons of Paris to exotic Monte Carlo, they become partners in a dizzying dance of desire – bound by a love stronger than any fantasy…”

  4. AngW says:

    Hunting down “Velvet Dreams” in 3…2…1…

  5. Jan Oda says:

    Ack!
    This sounds really exciting, but for a Belgium girl like me, hunting it down will be all crazingly expensive again. Nevertheless, here we go!

  6. molly_rose says:

    Definitely want to read this. Now.

  7. lunarocket says:

    I’ve got to read this, too! Sounds great. I’m tired of it being so “easy” for the hero and the heroine giving in because she can’t figure out what to do!

  8. Thank you says:

    Oh, for the days when a romantic heroine could have a varied sex life and no one swooned away in horror…I think I’ll find this one!

  9. Looks like the author was trying to give the courtship—if you could call it that—between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the Duke of Marlborough a fictional HEA. Alas, in real life, Consuelo caved in to Mommy, the duke turned out to be a scurvy knave, and they were scandalously divorced a decade or so later.

    Consuelo did, however, coin the phrase “heir and the spare,” so it wasn’t all for nothing.

  10. Jessica says:

    Edie YOU ROCK!! It is Velvet Dreams by Patricia Werner!  You guys need to check out the cover, that has to be one of the most uncomfortable poses I’ve ever seen.

    And as for why this book didn’t get me immediately hooked on romance . . . what can I say?  I was 12, and some people are slower than others.

  11. AllyJS says:

    This is going on my wishlist. I’ve just gone through a few romances with butthole heroes and I’m ready for a sympathetic one

  12. This sounds amazing! Just ordered a copy of my own and can’t wait to read it!

  13. willaful says:

    Where did you see the cover? Nothing i can find via google has it.

  14. library addict says:

    Where did you see the cover? Nothing i can find via google has it.

    Is this the one?
    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300369254316

  15. willaful says:

    Ah, thanks.

  16. Edie says:

    WOOT

    I finally got one! *happychairdance*

    I knew all those years of typing out blurbs before I discovered most of them were online would come in handy for more than improving my typing speed. LOL

  17. Jennifer Spiller says:

    I just ordered it!

  18. molly_rose says:

    The cover is awesome. I’m really digging the purple silk vest on the hero, and the heroine’s blue eyeshadow is certainly “fiercely independent”…
    That, and the fact that her neck is “fiercely independent” of her body.

  19. Cfarley says:

    On Amazon it looks like this author has quite a few category romances from Zebra under her name.  Another great cover of hers has the couple emerging from the center of a Mandolin?  Guess that means he’s got a really big instrument…..xxoocf

  20. Kilian Metcalf says:

    Reminds me of Edith Wharton’s “The Buccaneers” with some sex thrown in.  The “buccaneers” of the title were rich American girls married off to impoverished titled Englishmen who were not too fussy about whom they married.  Edith was born into one of New York’s old money families, so she had the opportunity to observe marriages like the Vanderbilt fiasco at close hand.  “The Buccaneers” came out in 1938, 12 years after the marriage was annulled and 32 years after the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough separated in 1906.  I’m sure their story inspired a lot of fiction.

  21. Kilian Metcalf says:

    Reminds me of Edith Wharton’s “The Buccaneers” with some sex thrown in.  The “buccaneers” of the title were rich American girls married off to impoverished titled Englishmen who were not too fussy about whom they married.  Edith was born into one of New York’s old money families, so she had the opportunity to observe marriages like the Vanderbilt fiasco at close hand.  “The Buccaneers” came out in 1938, 12 years after the marriage was annulled and 32 years after the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough separated in 1906.  I’m sure their story inspired a lot of fiction.

  22. Deb says:

    Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers makes great reading, especially for those of us who enjoy historical romances that involve American heroines and English heroes.  Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Randolph, was also a “buccaneer”—a rich American heiress who was married into the English aristocracy.  Like most of those marriages, it was not a happy one, and once Jennie had provided the “heir and a spare” in the form of Winston and his older brother, she and her husband “led their own lives” as the euphemism goes.

  23. Kilian Metcalf says:

    I’m thinking that Jenny Jerome probably was a more likely inspiration for Wharton’s book.  She married a younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough.  Consuelo married the 9th Duke.  Local connection – I live in Arizona, and there is a town called Jerome, named after the owner of the copper mine that was the main industry there.  The Jerome family was very prominent in NY society circles, and The Buccanneers was an unfinished manuscript that was published after Wharton’s death, so who knows how long it had been lying around before it was finished off and published a year after her death.  Funny how the genre lines blur when it come to writers like Wharton.  Why is she “Literature” with a capital L, when most of her stories are pure romance, and historical romance at that?  Is it because she palled around with the likes of Henry James?

  24. Kilian Metcalf says:

    I’m thinking that Jenny Jerome probably was a more likely inspiration for Wharton’s book.  She married a younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough.  Consuelo married the 9th Duke.  Local connection – I live in Arizona, and there is a town called Jerome, named after the owner of the copper mine that was the main industry there.  The Jerome family was very prominent in NY society circles, and The Buccanneers was an unfinished manuscript that was published after Wharton’s death, so who knows how long it had been lying around before it was finished off and published a year after her death.  Funny how the genre lines blur when it come to writers like Wharton.  Why is she “Literature” with a capital L, when most of her stories are pure romance, and historical romance at that?  Is it because she palled around with the likes of Henry James?

  25. Why is she “Literature” with a capital L, when most of her stories are pure romance, and historical romance at that?

    Well, for one thing, if you’re looking for a HEA, don’t read Wharton! The House of Mirth will leave you depressed for a week.

    What I love about her is her ability to depict that particular society—fin de siecle New York and Europe—in all its complexity, and without the rose-shaded spectacles. She lived it; she knew its cast of characters; she knew its hypocrisies. And she was a brilliant writer: she could turn from satire to pathos on a dime.

  26. Polly says:

    Wharton’s not so much with the HEA—in fact, I don’t think any of her stories end happily. And a HEA is pretty much a requirement for Romance. Most of literature is about relationships, but I require a HEA, or at least a HFN for me to consider it Romance (with a capital R).

    I’d say she’s Literature with a capital L because we still read her so many years on, and she did phenomenal things with the English language. I’m personally not really willing to apply Literature with a capital L to most of what’s printed in the last 30 years, since there’s just no way to predict what will continue to speak and be read after its moment (and that’s pretty much my grounds for is it or isn’t it Literature). The literariest of literary fiction that’s never touched ten years on isn’t Literature either, to me.

  27. SusannaG says:

    I think The Buccaneers is the only Wharton that ends with what one might even conceivably describe as a HEA.

  28. Sarah V. says:

    Yowzah!  I am so getting this book!!!!

  29. Polly says:

    Well, the main-ish character of the Buccaneers is supposed to run off with her true love, and there’s Big Scandal. I guess that’s happier than being stuck in a loveless marriage, but it’s not really a HEA. Plus, Wharton died before she finished the novel, so who knows how close to her outline she’d have stayed. My guess is the lovers would have been united but in ignominy. Cuz no one in a Wharton novel has it all.

    I love Wharton, but wow is the world a sad place after reading one of her novels.

  30. Cfarley says:

    I love this thread.  Much of Literary Fiction (read by insistence in college) is simply too sad and depressing for me.  Even Oprahs lite LF does not have a place in my work a day world.  If I lived in a candy cotton world maybe—but my world is hard and I love the relaxation/relief I get from my TRASH. xxoocf

  31. Sarah V. says:

    @Cfarley – We have a running joke in my family about the Oprah Book Club.  One of my family members just LOVES tragic books with lots of pain and “deep thought”.  Pretty much anything on the Oprah Book Club, really.  So half of us start laughing whenever Oprah has a new addition.

    “Oh, Kathy would LOVE it!”  It makes for easy gifting.

    I think the only book I ever really, truly enjoyed from OBC was Pillars of the Earth, and I read it years before she added it to the club.

  32. SusannaG says:

    Yeah, saying The Buccaneers sorta has an HEA is sorta stretching it, but it’s more true of that one than Wharton’s other novels!

    I wrote a fairly depressing short story in a creative writing class, and was asked by the teacher “if I had been reading Ethan Frome again.”  LOL

  33. Polly says:

    True.

    I took a few creative writing classes in college, and one of the things I remember most clearly was that no one, but NO ONE, was writing light stuff. It was all madness, sad breakups, alienation, and rape. I left each class wondering if the topics were reflections of people’s actual lives, or just what they thought a lot about or thought was what you were supposed to write about in a creative fiction class. It was pretty depressing. I wish I could confess to being the sole voice dedicated to humor in the class, but I was part of the alienation camp.

  34. Kilian Metcalf says:

    Thank you for opening my eyes to the fact that there is no HEA in Literature.  I’m planning to take that concept to the Yahoo group devoted to my all-time favorite author, the Victorian postal worker, Anthony Trollope.  He was Dickens’ contemporary and a good friend of George Eliot, but his work never seemed to get the respect that was given to theirs.  Now I realize that it is 90% of his books have a HEA.  He straddles the line between literature and genre fiction.  One of his books, The Eustace Diamonds, turns up frequently in undergraduate Victorian literature classes, but that is about the extent of the scholarly interest in his work.  Personally, I think he is a master and tons better than Dickens, who used spontaneous combustion in Bleak House to write himself out of a sticky situation.

  35. Kilian Metcalf says:

    Thank you for opening my eyes to the fact that there is no HEA in Literature.  I’m planning to take that concept to the Yahoo group devoted to my all-time favorite author, the Victorian postal worker, Anthony Trollope.  He was Dickens’ contemporary and a good friend of George Eliot, but his work never seemed to get the respect that was given to theirs.  Now I realize that it is 90% of his books have a HEA.  He straddles the line between literature and genre fiction.  One of his books, The Eustace Diamonds, turns up frequently in undergraduate Victorian literature classes, but that is about the extent of the scholarly interest in his work.  Personally, I think he is a master and tons better than Dickens, who used spontaneous combustion in Bleak House to write himself out of a sticky situation.

  36. JamiSings says:

    ACK! Back when I actually thought I could write I took a CW course. The teacher was one of those “feminists” who make REAL feminists look bad. (Kind of like how Fred Phelps makes real Christians look bad, only this dealt with feminist issues.) She LOVED long, pretentious, go no where stories about women with cheating husbands and fishing trips ending up with a guy dying of a heart attack.

    I turned in stories involving super heroes, vampires, etc. The class welcomed them. She didn’t seem so sure. LOL

    (I did get to her one time really badly. She was bad mouthing Hannibal, which I just read, saying that the book was “proof” that Thomas Harris hated women and blah blah blah. I asked her if she even read it. She admitted she had not. I then proceeded to tear her entire argument to shreds. She was very docile the rest of the semester having been embarrassed in front of her disciples – I mean students.)

  37. Sarah V. says:

    @Kilian—After watching The Way We Live Now, I became interested in Anthony Trollope.  You have now sealed the deal.  I’m perusing Trollope titles this very minute.  Thank you!

  38. Kilian Metcalf says:

    The Way We Live Now is my favorite novel by my favorite author.  It is his masterpiece IMHO.  I would invite you to join us at trollope @ yahoogroups.com but right now we are taking a trip on his dark side and reading some of his early works set in Ireland in the mid-1800s, full of grinding poverty, drunkenness and no HEA to be found.  We’ll get back to the regular stuff soon, though. It took him a little while to find his voice and his place, but when he did there is no competition.  The CW teacher would have loved this stuff, though, it is so depressing.

    Why do people think only depressing, downer stuff can be good writing?  I’ve read depressing crap and excellent genre fiction where everyone is happy.  Good work can be found everywhere.  Must one suffer for it to be Art? Foo on that.

  39. Kilian Metcalf says:

    The Way We Live Now is my favorite novel by my favorite author.  It is his masterpiece IMHO.  I would invite you to join us at trollope @ yahoogroups.com but right now we are taking a trip on his dark side and reading some of his early works set in Ireland in the mid-1800s, full of grinding poverty, drunkenness and no HEA to be found.  We’ll get back to the regular stuff soon, though. It took him a little while to find his voice and his place, but when he did there is no competition.  The CW teacher would have loved this stuff, though, it is so depressing.

    Why do people think only depressing, downer stuff can be good writing?  I’ve read depressing crap and excellent genre fiction where everyone is happy.  Good work can be found everywhere.  Must one suffer for it to be Art? Foo on that.

  40. JamiSings says:

    @Kilian – To me, it’s the same way a butt ugly piece of clothing can become “hot” just because some celeb says it is. Someone who everyone looks up to and wants to emulate declares a piece of work “genius” even when it’s a poorly written, depressing POS. *cough*CatcherInTheRye*cough* So everyone, even people who have never and never will read the book declares it genius so they’ll fit in with everyone else. And those, like myself, who dares think for themselves and say otherwise are ostracized and bullied. “How DARE you be different?”

    I call it the Sheep Factor.

    Someone, at some time, declared only sad endings were literature.  Everyone who wanted to be “hip” and “with it” agreed with them and it stuck. Now, so you look intelligent, you MUST agree with the rest of the sheep. Otherwise you’re “an idiot” and “so low class you just don’t get it.”

    But I’ve noticed that most of the people who go around saying how “intelligent” The Great Gasby is never even read it. BAA!!!!

    Stupid sheep.

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