When I first started reading romances, they all featured young heroines with older heroes. My reading tastes have changed over the years, and I don’t enjoy young heroines as much anymore. They inevitably seem, well, immature and naïve. Although the heroine of this book isn’t terrible, she did set my teeth on edge at times.

Clara Carrington answers the door late one evening and finds a devastatingly handsome, yet very ill man on her doorstep. He says he is friends with her sister and brother-in-law, Pauline and Nathaniel. Unfortunately, Captain Stone Hawke arrives before Nate’s letter, which asks for the Carringtons’ help in lodging the Captain.

Stone recently left the army after a tour of duty in India. He lost many men and his fiancé after a bomb exploded near the barracks. He blames himself for the explosion, and also has a near-fatal case of malaria to add to his burdens. He doesn’t know what to do with his life now that he has left the army, and isn’t even sure he wants to live.

Clara is the bleeding heart of the Carrington family. She genuinely cares for the downtrodden and the poor and takes a far more active effort than her family realizes in helping those in need in the city. The Carringtons are high society, and her mother’s idea of helping the poor is to do so from a considerable distance. Clara’s sisters are all out of the house, so she is left to her own devices, and since she is young, her judgment of certain situations is extremely poor.

She finds herself drawn to Stone, although he is not what her family would want for her by any means. Her father is grooming suitors for her – Stone is not among them. He is unemployed, ill, dependent on them, and not of their social class. He fascinates Clara, and infuriates her at the same time. She is trying desperately to help him regain his health and he isn’t very grateful for her help.

Stone knows Clara pities him. He believes her feelings stem from nothing more than what her generous heart would do for anyone in his situation. That he is destitute and unemployed only makes him more angry, and his guilt in failing to save his men doesn’t help.

There is a decent story here, don’t get me wrong, though the characterizations were troublesome. Clara makes some immature, nearly TSTL decisions, but often listened when Stone challenged her on the outcome of those choices. And while her altruistic tendencies could have lent a nice touch had they been more subtle, she instead came across as almost saccharine sweet at times. Finally, she was wishy-washy where her relationship with Stone was concerned and wavered over whether or not she loved him for too long.

Stone had some problems of his own. He continued to believe that Clara merely pitied him because she was so good and nice to everyone. As a result, he acted like a jerk towards her and stomped off in typical wounded, hotheaded male fashion. If not for an outside source, these two would never have ended up together, which did not make a romance in my mind.

If you like the younger heroine, older hero setup, this might be your cup of tea. Clara’s character just didn’t work for me, however, and I spent most of the book thinking, “save me from the teenage angst, please!”