This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by ClaudiaA. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Historical category.
The summary:
A marriage of convenience ignites into a passionate love affair in the hotly anticipated second novel in New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Sabrina Jeffries’s addictive Sinful Suitors series!
When Edwin Barlow, the Earl of Blakeborough, agrees to help his best friend’s impetuous ward, Lady Clarissa Lindsey, in her time of need, he knows he’s in for trouble. He’s been hunting for someone to wed, and she’ll just get in the way. Although captivated by the witty, free-spirited beauty, he fears she’d be all wrong as a wife…if she would even take such a gruff cynic for her husband. Yet he wants nothing more than to have her for his own.
Clarissa has no intention of marrying anyone—not Edwin, whom she’s sure would be an overbearing husband, and certainly not the powerful French diplomat stalking her. But when matters escalate with the diplomat, she chooses Edwin’s gallant offer of a marriage between friends in hopes that it will deter her stalker. She expects nothing more than an amiable union, but their increasingly tempestuous kisses prove more than she bargained for. When her stalker’s vow to expose the lovers’ deepest secrets threatens to destroy their blossoming attraction, will their tenuous bond withstand public ruin, or will Edwin lose all that’s important to him to protect his bride?
Here is ClaudiaA's review:
The Study of Seduction is set in the spring of 1830 and begins with the hero, Edwin Barlow, the Earl of Blakeborough, being asked to watch over Lady Clarissa Lindsey, who is related to his best (and very nearly only) friend, as the Season unfolds. The book is the second in a series but stands well on its own.
Clarissa is being pursued by a French nobleman and diplomat who is accosting her in increasingly more frightening ways. Her cousin and Edwin’s friend, Warren Corry, the Marquess of Knightford, is about to go overseas to help Clarissa’s brother and wants to make sure Clarissa has someone to protect her during his absence.
(Clarissa’s dad is dead, her mom is a little daffy, and her brother killed a man in a duel and had to flee England years ago.)
Clarissa and Edwin have known each other for many years. Their country estates are next to each other and Clarissa is best friends with Edwin’s sister. So Clarissa had been relegated to the role of annoying, frivolous friend of little sister in Edwin’s mind and Edwin got assigned the role of gruff, boring older brother of best friend in Clarissa’s mind. They have been getting on each other’s nerves forever.
Still, they are very much attracted to each other and the author makes that attraction clear from the very start. When Warren tells Edwin he should just ignore Clarissa’s protests about the scheme they are hatching, here’s how Edwin reacts:
Ignore Clarissa? Impossible. He’d spent the past few years trying unsuccessfully to unwrap the mystery that was Lady Clarissa Lindsey. Her barbed wit fired his temper, her provocative smile inflamed him, and her shadowed eyes haunted his sleep.
Escorting Clarissa about town is the very last thing that Edwin wants to do, not just because of the way she roils his emotions but also because Edwin has decided, very rationally, that it is about time for him to find a wife. He wants someone who will be his hostess and give him children, all in a very unemotional, duty-bound way.
The problem is, Edwin is a self-described curmudgeon, uncomfortable around other people and not good at all about the conventions of society and courtship. In the end, he reasons that, if he has to be out and about with Clarissa, at least he can take the opportunity to look for a suitable wife and get Clarissa to help him with the courtship. That was a bit of a stretch, in my mind, but that’s how he rationalizes it.
Clarissa doesn’t want to marry at all and in fact has turned down many marriage offers. Without getting too much into spoiler territory, she’s secretly healing from serious trauma, which is connected to her brother’s duel and subsequent exile. The trauma might be a trigger for some readers.
It doesn’t take long for things to come to a head and, when the stalker forces their hand, they act on the fly and invent a fake engagement. Things get trickier when the stalker reveals that, as a diplomat, he has access to incriminating evidence concerning Edwin’s family. Soon the only way to protect Clarissa and prevent such secrets from coming to light is for Edwin to marry Clarissa.
Edwin is honorable, protective, and adorably geeky. Clarissa is a little harder to like, in part because we are told she’s a “free spirit,” but don’t see much evidence of that other than mentions of her “flirty ways” (she’s not flirty because she likes being flirty or whatever, we are told later on, but it was related to the trauma). She’s more of underdeveloped character to me.
We spend a lot of time wondering why the villain is so fixated with Clarissa and bent on marrying her, and it’s a little baffling. Only towards the very end do some things surface to explain the obsession.
So we have a marriage of convenience (which is one of my favorite tropes in historical romance) with elements of friends-to-lovers in the beginning and overcoming trauma towards the end of the book. I believe it tried to be too many things at once.
This was my first Sabrina Jeffries book and while it was a pleasant read it wasn’t exactly hard to put down. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more had I known Clarissa and Edwin from previous books. But Edwin is a good hero, it was fun to watch Edwin and Clarissa learning to view each other’s in a different light, and the writing was good. It gets a B from me.
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Interesting review! Thank you.