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 request is from Meredyth and she wants to find a romance she read in high school:
I’m trying to recall a book I remembered hiding under my mattress during high school. This was the late 90s, early 2000s though, so my memory has completely failed me. The book could have been older, but not by a lot. I’d say 90s. Here’s what I recall:
The cover might have been teal, or the dress on the cover. I think the font was a sort of hot pink.
The plot: Heroine’s mother has married the hero’s brother and gone gallivanting around the world, leaving the heroine to take care of her siblings without much money. The heroine wants to learn how to seduce like a courtesan so that she can marry (or maybe she wants to BE a courtesan? I can’t remember which). She goes to find the hero who had a reputation as a rake, but has since left society and lives in the country. She wants him to teach her how to be seductive. Towards the end of the plot he is called back into action as a spy in France and must leave her. But she follows him! Or they get stuck together in France in so other way, and they must escape during the Terror.
Other details I remember: when she first meets him she thinks he’s a farmer because he’s pulling a sheep out of a hedgerow, shirtless. She and he bond over farming techniques because she’s also interested in soil, or cattle. And, in the dressmaker’s shop where he’s picking out her clothes for seduction, he picks one that is basically backless.
Who knows this one?
Promise Me Heaven
by
Connie Brockway
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Possibly Connie Brockway’s Promise Me Heaven, though it takes place during the Napoleonic war (not the Terror). And the cover doesn’t seem to match. But sheep. And a tutor in seduction. And the right family set-up.
I was gonna say that nothing else fits but Connie Brockway’s “My Dearest Enemy” has a very memorable sheep scene that fits!
Could it be “Rules of Passion” by Sara Bennett, cover doesn’t match and it’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, but maybe?
Agree with Deborah – “Promise of Heaven” by Connie Brockway. Brockway hits the reader with the enormous half-nude man in paragraph 3 of Chapter 1. Barely time to set down the coffee and grab a fan.
No one appeared to live on this high, windswept land. No one, that is, until she saw a lone herder half-buried in a nearby thicket. With a sigh of relief, Cat spurred her mare toward him. She was a third of the distance before she discovered he was half-naked. Quickly she reined in her horse.
Cat had seen men without their shirts before. She was, after all, the eldest in a family of three brothers and three sisters. But her brothers’ slender torsos in no way prepared her for this man. His was nothing like their slight adolescent forms.
He was simply enormous. He was tall, broad, and deep, from his impossibly wide shoulders to the long, thick thews of his thighs straining the fabric of his workman’s pants. Cat wondered how his wife found cloth to fit all of him, even as she called out. His back, gleaming with sweat and streaked with grime, bulged with muscle as he attempted to pull a large, anxious ewe from the thicket of briar in which she had entangled herself.
Coincidentally, I’m listening to this during my commute right now. 😀 Thirding “Promise Me Heaven” by Connie Brockway.
Off topic slightly but “Shirtless Sheep Rescue” is a reality show I would watch…
@Manda Collins: Time to cue up the sheep-shearing scenes in “The Thornbirds”!
Georgie! I think that’s it! You’ve cracked the case! Thank you!!!
Apropos windswept heaths and the heroes who live and rescue sheep on them, shoutout to Anne Bronte’s delightfully subversive The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the delicious ’96 miniseries adaptation with Tara Fitzgerald, Rupert Graves, and Toby Stephens (who definitely handles sheep, though I can’t remember the relevant state of shirt-wearing.)
That’s one of my favorite Bronte books! I didn’t know there was a miniseries. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks!