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James de Vere has always insisted on being perfectly pragmatic and rational in all things. It seemed the only way to deal with his overdramatic, greedy family. When he falls ill and no doctor in London can diagnose him, he returns home to Grace Hill in search of a physician who can – or to set his affairs in order.
Arriving at the doctor’s home, he’s surprised to encounter the doctor’s daughter Laura, a young woman he last saw when he was warning her off an attachment with his cousin Graeme. Alas, the doctor is recently deceased and Laura is closing up the estate, which must be sold off, leaving her penniless. At this, James has an inspiration: why not marry the damsel in distress? If his last hope for a cure is gone, at least he’ll have some companionship in his final days, and she’ll inherit his fortune instead of his grasping relatives, leaving her a wealthy widow with plenty of prospects.
Laura is far from swept off her feet, but she’s as pragmatic as James, so she accepts his unusual proposal. But as the two of them brave the onslaught of shocked and suspicious family members, they find themselves growing closer. They vowed, “until death do us part”…but now both are longing for their marriage to be more than momentary in this evocative romance.
Rating: Narration – B+ : Content – B+
A Momentary Marriage is the sequel to A Perfect Gentleman, and focuses on the unlikely romance between Sir James de Vere and Laura Hinsdale, two prominent secondary characters in the earlier story. In that book, we learned that Graeme Parr, Earl of Montclair – James’ cousin – and Laura (daughter of the local doctor) had fallen in love in their youth but were not able to marry because Graeme needed to marry an heiress in order to pull his family out of debt. It had been James who had gone to Laura and told her she needed to break things off with Graeme so that Graeme could salvage his family fortune and honour. Needless to say, while Laura knew that what James said was true, it stung, and they have avoided each other ever since.
In A Perfect Gentleman, James emerged as a witty – though cynical – man with a fondness for his cousin, his huge mastiff Demosthenes (Dem for short) and very little else. Enigmatic, good-looking and charming when he wants to be, he reveals little of himself and is the sort of man who buries his emotions deep and needs to maintain control. A Momentary Marriage opens several months later and finds James suffering from a serious illness that none of the medical men he’s seen can identify. The diagnoses run from a bad heart to brain fever to tumors, but the one thing the physicians do agree on is that he hasn’t long left to live.
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