HaBO: Hero Falls Overboard, And His Fiancee Transforms While He’s Gone

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!

This HaBO is from Jenn, who is looking for a historical where the hero goes overboard:

Long-time lurker, first time HaBO-er. I’ve been reading romance novels since elementary school (when my grandmother put Nora Roberts’ Honest Illusions ( A | K | G | AB )  – still, after all these years, my favorite – in my hands while telling my mother that “There’s really no sex,” hahahahaha, oh, Grandma).

So I’ve read a ton of them, and I have a really hard time keeping them straight sometimes. You know when you start reading one, and then you realize you’ve totally read it before? That happens to me all the time, and it happened a couple of times with the book I’m looking for (which, you’d think it must not be that memorable, but, again, twenty years of romance novels in my brain). It’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember it, because I really loved it when I first read it.

I must have read this book in the 90s – definitely no earlier and I’m pretty sure no later – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was published then, and it was probably by a bigger name author (I was reading my way through Catherine Coulter and Jude Devereaux and Nora Roberts’ older stuff at that point).

The hero is a lord whose name is maybe Julian? Or his name starts with a J. I think.

He meets this girl who I don’t think was the same class, and he marries her because, I don’t know, she’s refreshing in her innocence and simplicity?

Anyway, on their wedding night, they might be on a ship, and before he can seal the deal – or right after? – the hero goes up on deck and falls overboard or maybe is kidnapped, but either way he disappears for a couple of years, and everybody thinks he’s dead.

Then he shows up again, and he finds out that his wife has been taken in by his family (maybe?), and she’s grown up to be sophisticated and elegant, and he’s angry she’s not the naive little farm girl anymore or whatever. There might also be cousin who’s in love with the heroine, who was maybe part of helping her become fancy.

Hope someone out there knows what I’m talking about! I’d really like to read this one again, and then eventually forget it again, and then rediscover it again! Thanks!

Wow -hero overboard AND a makeover? Booyah! Does anyone recognize this book? Help a Bitch Out!