This HaBO comes from Alisa! It’s a beefy one and does feature a terrible earl:
I’ve been trying to find this book for absolutely ages, and I’m hoping that someone might be able to find it based on this description. It’s absolutely killing me that I remember so much of the plot of this book, but I can’t remember anything about the title, author, or character names. I’m pretty sure I read it in the mid- to late-90s, and it definitely doesn’t have the flavor of a romance from the 70s, so it was likely written in either the 80s or the 90s, but it could be very early 2000s if I’m wrong about exactly when I read it.
The book is a historical romance and set in England. I can’t remember the exact time period, but possibly Victorian or maybe Georgian. There is a war going on (although lord knows that doesn’t narrow it down with Great Britain!), possibly the Napoleonic wars or the Crimean war.
In the beginning, the heroine is married off at a very young age (like 15?) to, I think, an earl who is in his early 60s. I can’t remember how he finds her, but I think her family is noble but not rich, and he picks her because he recognizes that she has the potential to be a great beauty and he wants to mold her into the perfect countess, and her parents basically force her into the marriage. The earl hires tutors to make her his perfect bride. He has a great-nephew (or maybe he’s the nephew, not a great-nephew – I’m gonna use “nephew” going forward cuz it’s easier to type) who looks down on her as an empty-headed gold-digger and doesn’t treat her well when they first meet. The earl is unable to consummate the marriage (too old to get it up), but he uses his fingers to confirm her virginity (blech!). After that, he leaves her alone except for forcing her to share his bed for at least one night per month to make it look as though they’re having sex, but he never touches her again.
There’s a bit of a time jump and now she’s a few years older, poised and confident from the years of tutors and the earl regularly shows her off as his possession at parties and basically treats her like a show dog. She’s naturally very lonely. Her younger brother comes to tell her that he’s enlisting in the military as he’s now old enough and wants to get away from their parents. She can’t convince him to change his mind, so she goes to her husband’s nephew to beg him to look after her brother during the war. I think they fight about it a bit as he still has a bad opinion of her and doesn’t see how he can help.
He does end up trying to look out for the kid, but despite that, her brother is killed. The nephew is also badly wounded, but when he’s sent home to recuperate, he leaves his sick bed early to apologize to the heroine and deliver her brother’s journal to her. He ends up collapsing in the driveway as he’s leaving the earl’s house after delivering the journal, and she has him brought back inside and calls for the doctor. The doctor determines that he has a serious lung infection and could die without around the clock care. The heroine volunteers to nurse him, and as part of that, several times per day, she has to roll the hero onto his stomach and beat on his back with cupped hands in order to loosen the pus/phlegm from his lungs so he can cough it up. After many tireless days/weeks of nursing, he finally pulls through. During this time, they get to know each other better and stop hating each other.
At some point in here, the earl sees their friendship developing and tries to bribe his nephew into sleeping with her and getting her pregnant since he is unable and the baby would still be of his bloodline. Nephew categorically refuses, but later in a moment of vulnerability, they do end up having sex and that turns into a torrid affair. For the first time in a long time, the earl uses his fingers on her again during one of the nights that she has to sleep in his bed and thus knows that she’s no longer a virgin, but because he knows that it’s his nephew that’s sleeping with her, he’s happy about it and doesn’t say anything.
She eventually ends up pregnant, and once the earl finds out, he takes the worst possible opportunity to reveal that he had paid his nephew to impregnate her, hiding the fact that the nephew turned him down, and causing her to feel used and betrayed by the nephew who she now loves. She rides to the nephew’s house to confront him and ends up slashing him across the face with her riding crop and says she never wants to see him again. The nephew actually abides by her wishes, believing that he’s hurt her too much to be forgiven, until she gives birth and the baby turns out to be a girl. The earl goes into an apoplectic fit because it’s not a boy and starts destroying the study and/or his bedroom, and the servants (who knew about her affair with the nephew and kept it secret) send someone to go get the nephew to come help. In the end, the earl is in a coma or a non-verbal state for some time before he finally dies, and in that time, the hero and heroine finally reconcile, which leads to them ending up together in a happily ever after.
I’ve never been able to recall so many details of a book and yet have no clue of the title or author. I’m almost positive it’s not by any of the most well-known historical romance names – Lisa Kleypas, Karen Robards, Mary Balogh, Jo Beverley, Amanda Quick, Julie Garwood, Teresa Medieros, Mary Jo Putney, or Jude Devereaux – although these were the types of authors that I was reading at that time. I’m also pretty sure it’s a stand-alone book and not part of a series. Does anyone recognize this book?
Can we HaBO?! This is such a thorough description.
It’s got some Catherine Coulter vibes? But not one I can remember reading?
@Omphale I had the same thought, which led me to Coulter’s THE COUNTESS, a revamped version from 1999 of her first novel, THE AUTUMN COUNTESS, from 1979. I read it ages ago, and it definitely has a lot in common with the Mystery Book, as well as being one of Coulter’s few standalones, but I don’t think it’s the right book because (1) it was rewritten to be a Gothic, and Alisa remembers so much of the book that she’d probably have remembered that, and (2) based on the Goodreads reviews, the Coulter book has very little sex, and no one mentions the pregnancy subplot.
Enough of the details match that this is Anita Mills’ Autumn Rain. Though she doesn’t end up sleeping with the grandson (pretty sure grandson, not nephew); she ends up sleeping with the earl her father first tries to compromise into marriage with her. But there’s absolutely, definitely the scene with the fingers in that book, and she absolutely hits him across the face with a whip.
@Star: “the Coulter book has very little sex” — its been a very very long time since I read Coulter, but that’s definitely not what I remember about her books.