The Duke Who Loved Me is a friends to lovers romance between James Cantrell, the new Duke of Tereford, and Miss Cecelia Vainsmede, the daughter of the man who acted as his guardian during his minority. It has some fun and interesting things going on in the background to the story, but it missed the mark for me for two reasons. The first was James’s insufferable self-centredness, and the second was the failure to resolve the central conflict of the novel in a convincing fashion.

When James goes to visit his inheritance for the first time, he is dismayed to discover that his great uncle was a hoarder – every room of the townhouse is packed to the rafters with worm-eaten furniture, clothes, antique daggers, crockery, baskets full of letters, and the occasional treasure. Overwhelmed by the scale of the situation, James hits on a solution: a marriage of convenience to Cecelia, the practical, organised daughter of his guardian.

There’s just one problem – Cecelia isn’t interested. Why isn’t she interested? Because she has been having to nag a resentful James to get his act together on a regular basis since she was nine years old (her father never really did his duty as a guardian, so Cecelia had all the work of getting James to do what he needed to do). She has no interest in making this into a permanent arrangement.

James spends the first half of the book sulking about this inexplicable rejection, because this is the level of maturity we are dealing with here. James might be a duke, but he’s no prize. Yes, he is wealthy and handsome, and he can be charming when he bothers to pay attention, but he is also utterly selfish and arrogant. He doesn’t want the inheritance because of the work that comes with it, he has no interest in helping the tenants on his estate (he inherits a huge stack of unread letters among the other detritus left behind by his great uncle, and as far as I can tell, the letters are still unread at the end of the story) and he honestly can’t understand why Cecelia would not jump at the chance to wed him. He also becomes overwhelmed with jealousy the first moment when someone else starts showing signs of courting Cecelia, and behaves badly, before going into an even bigger sulk. Never once does he appear to consider Cecelia’s feelings about anything.

(James does have some redeeming features. If he sees people suffering right in front of him, he tries to help. But really, his self-absorption is nearly boundless.)

Cecelia, for her part, is an interesting, thoughtful, sensible character, and I liked her a lot, even if she is inexplicably in love with James from the start. She has backbone and compassion and is rather limited by her circumstances, but has created a life that she enjoys nonetheless. She is also far too sensible to marry James when he first asks, and indeed, only marries him when it becomes socially necessary for her to do so.

Alas, it turns out that marriage doesn’t magically fix their relationship, which brings me to the second thing that really frustrated me about this story.

James and Cecelia don’t communicate, unless you count having sex in order to avoid difficult conversations as a form of communication, which I don’t. Mostly, they each sit there in their own heads getting irritated with each other, each assuming that the other has married them solely for convenience, and in James’s case, resenting Cecelia for being competent at the very things he wanted her to do in the first place. This is not resolved until the final pages of the book – and I would argue that it is not resolved even then. Yes, they establish that they love each other, but love is not the same thing as being able to have a rational conversation about how this marriage will work. It’s nice that they are finally beginning to be open with each other, but actually, who is going to be doing all the work of the estate, and making decisions, and so forth? How are they going to live together, and what do they actually need and want from each other? Nobody knows, certainly not me. I needed some kind of indication that they could actually work as a couple outside the bedroom.

Perhaps the thing that frustrates me most about this story is that there were things I liked. I liked Cecelia’s new friends, whom I recognised from an earlier novel, and I liked the messiness of her relationship with her aunt and her father. I was also kind of fascinated by the House Full Of Endless Stuff that was the background to much of the story. There was something strongly appealing to me about the way the Great Decluttering progressed through phases ranging from horrifying chaos with furniture tossed onto the lawn, to treasure hunts, to random and welcome theft, to auctions. I also liked the family who starts off living secretly in the unused stables, and winds up becoming part of the household and involved in the larger events of the book. Basically, I enjoyed the world of this book, just not the central relationship.

I’m honestly rather sad that I can’t recommend The Duke Who Loved Me. Once James stopped sulking and began to grow up a little, I had real hopes for him. But it took him a very, very long time to reach that point. And, like I said, I enjoyed Cecelia from the start. While I think this story fails as a romance, there were chunks of it that I enjoyed. I just wish I’d seen James and Cecelia working together to solve problems, rather than having them at odds from start to end. Friendly bickering is one thing, but this went so much deeper, and their conflicts required a proper resolution.