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Two friends. Too many missed chances.
Leopold Halton, the duke of Dammerton, is the man with everything: perfect hair, beautiful waistcoats, and London’s finest collection of decorative objects. But two years after his highly entertaining divorce (entertaining for everyone but him, that is), Leo still doesn’t have what he wants most: another wife.
Leo is ready to propose to a suitable lady, but with gossip dissecting his every move, the family of his nearly ideal future bride demand that he first stop calling on artist Juno Bell, the first woman he ever kissed and now, a decade later, his friend.
After 10 years of hard work to become an artist, Juno has everything she dreamed of: a flourishing studio, a wealthy patroness, and the freedom to live as she pleases. She even receives visits from a duke (and don’t London’s gossips love that!).
Juno has always known she can never hold on to Leo, yet when he declares their friendship must end, she finds it harder than expected to let him go. At least, not without a kiss.
After all, if their friendship must end anyway, then they have nothing more to lose…right?
Rating: Narration – A; Content – B
Mia Vincy’s Longhope Abbey series continues with book four, A Scandalous Kind of Duke. Friends-to-lovers and second-chance romances are two of my favourite tropes, and the glimpses we’ve had of the two protagonists – free-spirited, bohemian artist Juno and stuffy, duty-conscious duke Leo – in the previous books have been intriguing, so I’ve been looking forward to their story.
A decade earlier, before Leo Halston was a duke and Juno Bell had embarked upon her artistic career, they shared a passionate kiss and Juno told Leo she loved him. Taken aback and not at all sure what to make of any of it, Leo reacts by telling Juno they can never be together because of the difference in their stations and the duty he owes to his family; Juno shrugs it off by telling him she never expected anything more, but had kissed him simply because she wanted to, in the moment.
Ten years later, Leo, Duke of Dammerton, while not exactly a pauper, nonetheless needs an injection of cash in order to expand the artistic foundation that shares his name. His divorce from the Hungarian princess he married in haste some years earlier was as costly as it was scandalous, but that was two years ago now, and Leo decides to kill two birds with one stone – do his duty to his lineage and obtain the money he needs for the Dammerton Foundation in the time-old manner so beloved of strapped-for-cash aristocrats and marry it. Being a young, handsome and still-fairly-wealthy duke makes him an eligible parti, but although his family history (his father had two families and lived with his mistress) and being divorced haven’t quite put him beyond the pale as far as the ton is concerned, its matrons and marriage-minded mamas view him with more than a little suspicion. It hasn’t helped his cause that the last couple of young ladies he was seen to have shown some interest in were then set aside, at no little cost to their own reputations. After all, when a lady falls out of favour with a duke, everyone else naturally wonders what was wrong with her.
Leo has, however, found an ideal candidate in Miss Susannah Macey, who fulfills all the criteria suggested to him for the perfect wife; she has twenty thousand pounds, is of child-bearing age and is very suitable duchess material. She doesn’t exactly fire his blood or his imagination, but he likes her and is determined to make her a good husband and ensure that this marriage works. When her grandfather – her guardian – insists Leo ends his friendship with Miss Juno Bell (in his opinion, an unmarried woman making her living as an artist is an aberration!) before he will consent to the marriage, Leo is fully prepared to do as he asks, despite his niggling feeling of injustice. He needs some kind of order in his life and this is his chance to do things right.
In the decade since that kiss and declaration of love, Juno has worked hard to make her name as an artist and is flourishing. She’s the niece of a baronet – Sir Gordon Bell and his wife took Juno in and cared for her after her parents dumped her on their doorstep and left the country – and being on the fringes of society means she can live more or less as she pleases. She paints, she travels, she takes the odd lover (very discreetly of course); she lives a bohemian lifestyle, and it suits her. She’s maintained her friendship with Leo despite that youthful indiscretion, and if his hasty drunken marriage caused a pang somewhere in the vicinity of her heart, well, that’s long since gone and forgotten. Mostly.
Of course, Leo’s decision to cut ties with Juno isn’t as easy as he thinks it should be, and even though Juno has known Leo would have to marry again some day, that isn’t as easy to accept as perhaps it should be. These two have been in denial about their feelings for one another for so long that it seems they’ve actually started to believe that they’re nothing more than friends, and they have a lot of soul-searching to go through in order to realise the extent to which they’ve been fooling themselves. Juno has never understood just how much her abandonment by her parents has informed her attitude towards relationships, how her belief that nothing lasts has translated into words and actions which have led Leo to believe she’s not interested in anything permanent. And Leo’s disastrous first marriage has made him want to eschew passion and any serious entanglements, so he’s given off signals that he’s ‘untouchable’ and is not desirous of anything that involves real and deep emotions.
It’s very rare for me, a hero-centric reader, to find that I like the heroine more than the hero in a romance, but this is one of those times. Juno is so very much herself, so lively and honest and interesting and I was pleased that the author found a way to portray her authentically and as a woman of her time. So many heroines in historical romances these days are social reformers, tavern or gambling-hell owners who gad about London with little regard for their reputations and act and speak in a manner more in keeping with the twenty-first century than the nineteenth, but Juno, despite her free-spirited nature, isn’t one of those. She knows she has to maintain a degree of respectability and operates within the social boundaries, which are perhaps a little more flexible because of the fact she’s not one of the social elite, but which are nonetheless very much present.
Leo is a witty, charming hero, but I found him harder to like to start with (not helped by the fact that he acts cruelly towards Juno on a couple of occasions.) There’s no doubt he’s constrained by duty and responsibility, and also by his own view that he needs his life not to be “messy”, but it wasn’t until the second half of the book that I really started to like him, once we started to see his more vulnerable, less pig-headed side, the real man beneath the veneer, the man who loved deeply and has never really stopped.
Mia Vincy is a terrific writer – in fact, she’s one of the handful of writers of historical romance I still read – who knows how to craft interesting, well-developed characters and imbue them with warmth and charm, and to introduce conflict into a story in a way that is dictated by the characters rather than any particular plotline. I liked Juno and Leo individually and as a couple and I enjoyed the book as a whole, but the pacing is on the slow side, especially in the first half, and the second seemed like a race to the finish. I also can’t deny that this is one of those stories that couldn’t exist if the protagonists had just had a simple conversation, and came away thinking that perhaps it might have worked better as a novella.
That said, getting to listen to Kate Reading for eleven hours can never be a bad thing! As I’ve gravitated away from m/f romances, I’ve listened to her less frequently than I used to, but she’s every bit as good as I remember, and delivers a consistently excellent performance here. Her portrayal of Juno is especially good, really capturing the character’s zest for life and generous spirit, and Leo sounds exactly as he should, complete with that slight aristocratic drawl and deadpan delivery of witticisms Ms. Reading is so very good at. She’s equally good when it comes to conveying the true emotions motivating the characters – despair, anguish, passion – and at creating and clearly differentiating a large-ish secondary cast which includes stuffy old Earls, gossipy (and vindictive) matrons, proper young ladies and a wonderfully louche former soldier – who happens to be Leo’s half-brother.
A Scandalous Kind of Duke isn’t my favourite book by this author and lacks the humour and vitality of the other books in the Longhope Abbey series, but Kate Reading’s performance kept me engaged through the slower parts, and if you, like me, miss the days of really good historical romance (in which the word ‘historical’ was not so often ignored) then this one might be a good bet.
This review originally appeared at AudioGals.
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