You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
Bitchery reader Jen writes:
After seeing all the success you people have at ID’ing books, I have one for you.
This was when I was still sneaking books from my mother’s reading, but before I got smart enough to start writing my favorites down (because she doesn’t like to re-read books, and I do).
The book is a Regency-era Romance and it happens in a city. The hero is investigating… something.
The heroine I remember more clearly. She gets “hunches” that oftentimes come true. In one part of the book one of the villans gives her something to drink that makes her sick and maybe helps her hunches get better. I seem to remember cards in the scene. The heroine also happens to invest a sum of money in a ship that she thinks will give her good returns when it comes back, and when it doesn’t come back in time means that she is put in an awkward situation that might be the reason that she is thrown together with the hero. At the end of the book the ship comes back and she gains financial freedom, and thus doesn’t have to work for the hero anymore, and the subsequent parting has him (I think) realizing how much of an ass he’s been.
Other details… I think there’s sex in a carriage. Or at least he pulls out at the last moment and cums on her thighs and then they have to get out of the carriage and she’s walking around with a sticky mess. I’m fairly certain that she might have been a virgin.
The hero may have had a limp. The book may also have been part of a series. The bad guy’s may want the heroine to be part of their plan. Someone takes morphine in the book, and it’s not one of the main characters.
There’s also a part where the hero tells her to stay behind, or tells her she shouldn’t go “investigating” into the villains house when they are there for some reason and she doesn’t listen. A scene afterward has them running over a lawn. Maybe.
I hope these details work. I think I’ve built the book to be better than it actually was, but I would still like to read it.
I have to confess: after the hunches and the drugging and the villainy, getting to the part where he spooged man pudding on her thighs in a carriage and then she walked around IN the wet spot had me laughing harder than I care to admit. Because… whoa. That is some fucked up mess right there. So, who can guess this one?
Oh, this is definitely I Thee Wed, Amanda Quick.
http://www.amazon.com/I-Thee-Wed-Amanda-Quick/dp/0553574108
oh, and, I loved this book. It’s campy and awesome in a way that only an Amanda Quick book could be. Really, it works, I promise.
Crap! I knew this one too! It’s sooooo Amanda Quick. Hunches and investigations and TSTL ladies with splatter on their thighs….
Victoria: DAMN GIRL. Well played!
It’s so weird to me how these books you guys ID could so easily be XXX versions of YA stuff I loved. This one, for example, reminded me of Phillip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart books: THE RUBY IN THE SMOKE, THE SHADOW IN THE NORTH, THE TIGER IN THE WELL (and there was another one I didn’t read).
There was opium, a nasty scene in a carriage, lots of investigating, a ship that is lost and comes back, yadda yadda. But without the splooging.
Weird, I’ve been thinking about pulling out this Amanda Quick series for about a week now…this might spur me to actually do it because I kinda’ liked these books, too.
Katie, thank you. So it’s NOT just me. I kept thinking This sounds like Pullman, but there was definitely no walking wet spot in those books.
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No splooging? That’s no fun. *shakes head mournfully*
I do enjoy an Amanda Quick now and then. She rarely rocks my socks, but she’s very consistant. You know exactly what you’re going to get when you pick up one of her books- a spunky (usually red-headed) heroine, a hero who knows some obscure form of marshall arts, a mysterious bad guy, and a couple of hours of entertainment. When I’m in the right mood, an AQ and some cocoa are pretty much the perfect Sunday afternoon.
I just finished The River Knows and while it was some excellent mind-candy for a weekend read, it wasn’t quite in the same camptastic league as I Thee Wed and some of her earlier stuff. AQ was one of the very first romance authors I read, so she forever has a soft spot in my heart.
OH, thank you thank you! I feel so silly that people ID’d it so quickly, but I’ve been stumped for quite a while.
*trotts off to find a copy… hmmm, where can I find one in Sweden?*
This isn’t the book with the carriage sex where he thinks she’s a hooker and then realizes just prior to point of entry that she’s really an innocent maiden and rethinks the humpage, but then the carriage hits a rut in the road and she’s deflowered via turbulence, is it?
Deflowered via turbulence? I think my brain just died.
I must read this! What’s the title?
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Sounds like the heroine in this book is “spunky” in more than one way after that carriage ride.
It might be. I can’t remember. I do remember reading a book with deflowering via turbulence, but I’m not sure if it’s that one.
Cathy: Wonderful. Simply wonderful. Spunky heroine. *snickers*
I had a huge love for her books before the “age of Varna” took them over (I think the book mentioned here might be one of the last ones I read). Once they all started to include a made up island, culture, martial art and magic they were skirting too close to the shoals of paranormal for me.
Yeah, I snickered as I typed it, but I try to be a Mature Adult at least occasionally. I should have known that this wasn’t the place for that kind of thing!
>>Deflowered via turbulence? I think my brain just died. <<
Ditto, and my wireless keyboard is now wearing most of a can of soda. This has my vote for phrase of the week!
Yes, Becky, you should have known better 🙂
I snicker/cringe whenever a heroine is described as “spunky.” And I pray to the gods who look after fools and writers that, should I ever get published, no heroine of mine is ever described as such. Even if she is. Even if it’s in more than one way.
Which was the Quick book that had the hero deflowering the heroine, which she thought was really wonderful. But she spills tea on the sheets. When he sees the tea stain the next day the hero he had injured her thus causing an incredible Big Mis. It just made me cringe to think of anyone who would confuse a tea stain with a blood stain—maybe a little drop or two—but a whole big puddle?
I can’t remember, either, but I swear it’s an Amanda Quick book whichever one it is! Oh, things like this are maddening to me because it’s *just* out of reach of my memory.
I think there are actually two Amanda Quick books mixed up together.
The main one, the woman with hunches and the tea, lost ship, secret martial arts and a red flower etc is ‘I Thee Wed’.
But I’m pretty sure the man with the limp and the carriage sex are from the ‘Slightly Shady’ / ‘Don’t Look Now’ / ‘Late for the Wedding’ trilogy with Tobias March and Lavinia someone.
They are the only four Amanda Quick books I have actually read, but they were fun and enjoyable in a ‘brain is switched off’ way.
I liked the one where everybody spilled chicken blood on the sheets to prove the heroine’s virginity and then the hero had to stab himself to account for all the blood. It was one of AQ’s rare medievals—Desire, I think.
I love these books on audio. The reader, Barbara Rosenblatt, is incredibly talented. She also does all the Elizabeth Peters books…so Tobias sounds pretty much just like Emerson, but that’s cool with me.
Seduction, the first Amanda Quick book, is the one where the newlywed husband thinks he finally has seduced his bride into a wedding night (he had promised to delay consummating the marriage until they knew each other better; but he hadn’t promised not to try to seduce her into changing her mind). She prepares tea, with a sedative in it; he drinks it. The soporific in the tea in conjunction with the port he had drunk makes him fall asleep before he “completes the act.” She pours too much of the reddish-colored tea on the sheets; when he sees the stain the next morning, he is horrified, believing that he savaged her. As he abjectly tries to make amends, she becomes more and more guilt-stricken, until she tells him the truth.
The ancient Oriental society is “Vanza”.
Kay
Oh, I have to check this one out!
Cathy in AK – I used to work with Scott when he’d work on projects with the University. I think I still have a picture of him and Musgrave and bunch of other guys on deck with their shirts off. Rowwrr!!
Cue “it’s a small world…”
the part where he spooged man pudding on her thighs
Best. Description. Evah.
And Katie, clearly the book title you were forgetting from that YA series is THE WHAT-WHAT IN THE BUTT.
The descriptions of carriage-secks remind me of a hysterical… um, historical… I once read where the hero and heroine were gettin’ their freak on in a carriage and the hero had told his driver to take this really bumpy road. I think they even described them as washboard bumps. And as the hero is down on is knees proving he’s a cunning linguist, he has his hand pressed against her clit and keeps yelling for his driver to go faster, faster! This combination of wooden-wheeled carriage, bumpy road, and pressure from his hand apparently created the world’s first vibrator.
And as the heroine was screaming with orgasmic whooptee, I couldn’t help thinking, “Do these people think the driver is deaf and stupid or what?”
This reminds me of the carriage scene in Kathleen Woodiwiss’s ‘Shanna’, if I recall the book correctly. I think the hero, Ruark, deflowered Shanna in a carriage. The whole thing was a bit yuck, to be honest.
Vanza was the big Quick shark jump for me.
Vanza; Varna. Whatever.
Tania HC/Marquisse de Swissheboucle—Wow, it IS a small world! Do you want me to tell Scott you said hello? A picture of a bunch of shirtless guys on the deck of a ship is begging for some fake pirate book cover-related snark 😉
sub word: many—as in many surprises when you read SB!
Yeah, Quick lost me with all the Vanza
crap
stuff, too. Her books may have been a bit predictable but they were enjoyable predictable before that. Now I hesitate to pick up *anything* by her because of her Vanza creations.
I like Quick; they’re on my re-re-re-read pile 🙂 always good when i need a lift. i like her sci-fi (Krentz? Castle?) even better.
I remember that one – very cute!
For the first time while reading one of these I knew the author if not the book. Maybe it’s me or does Quick best describe most of the first sex scenes in her historicals. The heroine always “feeeeelllllsss ssoooo goooooddd.”