This HaBO comes from Michigander, who hopes to find this historical romance:
Historical Romance set in England or Wales…believe the area has hills or cliffs.
Set at Christmas time.
Begins with a woman riding in a carriage…planning to apply/take a position as governess or housekeeper to a reclusive man with two children .I think both children are boys. (She had heard of the position just as she was getting ready to flee town…maybe London.)
Woman is running/hiding from something or someone.
I believe the woman’s mother ran off years ago, or was very promiscuous.
I believe the book was written sometime between 2015-2022.
The woman decorates the home for Christmas…hasn’t happened for years, I think.
The man’s first wife may have died under mysterious circumstances.
It might have been a short story in a Christmas Anthology.
Can we HaBO?
I know I read this! So frustrating!!
The cliffs part reminds me of Mimi Matthews’ Parish Orphans of Devon—pretty sure one of them has a Christmas angle, but I think the two boys are missing.
It makes me think of one of the stories from the Under the Mistletoe anthology by Mary Balogh.
It feels like Laura Lee Guhrke’s Governess Gone Rogue. Two ill-behaved twin boys who are too smart for their own good. She’s had issues with ill behaved grown men….
This sounds like the first book in the “Gift-Wrapped Governess” anthology from Harlequin Historical. Sophia James et al as authors. The heroine is escaping a bad guy in London and takes a position as a governess to a widower with three boys. His first wife died tragically but it wasn’t a happy marriage (and one of the boys is maybe not his but he’s raising the boy as his own).
Meredith SOLVED this! Yes! I was looking for Gift-Wrapped Governess” -specifically the novella by Sophia James “Christmas at Blackhaven Castle”.
(However, I must have gotten details of two different books messed intertwined …this novella had three boys, not two, and no suspenseful cliff scene.)