This HaBO comes from Elizabeth. Content warning for the description below:
This mystery book has haunted me for around 20 years now. Here’s what I remember about this historical romance:
The village and the heroine are attacked by an enemy. She is raped, gets pregnant, and loses the baby. Meanwhile, the hero’s wife/mistress has died, leaving behind a newborn baby. A perfect pairing, no?
She nurses the baby, and at one point, the baby was so cold it was turning blue, so the heroine put the baby in the bodice of her dress against her skin. The hero finds them that way and their romance begins.
I really wish I could remember more details! But those are the ones that stuck with me as I was in my teens/early 20s, sneaking romance novels. It feels like it was a viking/medieval/Scottish novel, but I cannot be sure. Please, HaBO!
A HaBO twenty years in the making!
At first I thought this said “baby in a bottle” and was confused and slightly horrified. This sounds very old school and I’ll in intrigued. Following!
I don’t think this is the right book, but it’s giving me strong “Sunset Embrace” by Sandra Brown vibes.
Heorine loses her child and ends up being the wet nurse for the hero’s child who’s mother died in child birth.
@JillQ—if it helps, there was a book on sale recently by an author named Virginia Heath which I read as “Vaginal Health.” My first thought was, “Well, that’s a bit forward, even for a romance novel!” We will not discuss how long it took me to consider that I might have misread…
Also not the right book, but Candice Proctor (CS Harris) wrote a book — Night in Eden — set in Australia, where a woman who was transported loses her child and ends up being a wet nurse to a station owner’s motherless child. First published in 1997, so right time frame. Must have been a major trope around that time.
Here’s A Goodreads list of wet nurse books. Perhaps the book might be found there.
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/wet-nurse
@JillQ sung to the tune of “Message in a Bottle”
Following