This HaBO comes from Brooklynn, who wants to find this romance:
I am trying to track down a standalone mass-market historical romance paperback that I read years ago. It would have been published anywhere from the late 1990s to 2010.
The Heroine: Lucy. She lives with her father and is highly intelligent but very near-sighted—she completely relies on her glasses to see. She is hired to restore a library at a grand estate.
The Hero: Nicholas. He is a brooding widower who owns the estate where Lucy is working.
Lucy is working on restoring the books in Nicholas’s library. While searching a desk, she discovers a hidden drawer containing a fictional manuscript written by Nicholas’s deceased wife.
The manuscript tells a story about twin sisters who were severely abused by their mother. As Lucy reads it, she realizes this “fiction” is actually a true autobiographical account of the late wife’s hidden childhood.
The late wife’s unhinged mother is orchestrating a dark plot. She wants to secretly swap in the late wife’s identical twin sister (whom nobody knew existed) and trick Nicholas into marrying her, pretending his first wife never actually died.
It was a total standalone novel (not part of a massive family series), and it beautifully blended traditional Regency/historical romance with heavy Gothic suspense elements. I’m not completely sure that those are the main characters names but they sound right. Does this ring a bell for anyone? Thank you so much for the help!
Can we HaBO?