Narrated by Veida Dehmlow

A Duke Never Yields is the third in the Affairs by Moonlight trilogy which centres around the love lives of three different couples who end up spending best part of a year living in partial seclusion in an old Italian castle.

Unusually for a series of books, each story happens concurrently rather than consecutively, which means the listener gets to hear some scenes from different points of view in each book. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen so often as to become repetitive, and I confess this is the sort of narrative device I rather enjoy. That said, the book can definitely be listened to or read as a stand-alone, as the overlapping threads are not allowed to overshadow the events in the story.

The eponymous duke is Arthur Penhallow, Duke of Wallingford who, at twenty-nine, is one of the most renowned lotharios in the country. His maternal grandfather is the machiavellian Duke of Olympia (who is also a strong background presence in Ms Gray’s current Princess in Hiding books) and when Olympia appears one morning and accuses his grandson of being a waste of space, good for nothing but shagging, drinking and general debauchery, and informs him that he has to clean up his act he is, to say the least, annoyed. And then becomes very alarmed when Olympia tells him he must either propose marriage within the next few months to a lady of Olympia’s choice or join a planned retreat to Italy with his brother, Roland, and their “friend” (in reality, Olympia’s natural son), Phineas Burke, in order to, as we might say today, get his shit together and work out what he’s going to do with his life.

En route to the Castel Sant’ Agata, the men encounter a party of ladies consisting of Lady Alexandra Morley, her sister Abigail and their cousin Lilibet, each of whom has her own reasons for wanting to get away for a while, too.

Rather like the characters in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, the men have decided to undertake a year of quiet and study away from female company. But the best laid plans of mice and men cannot be allowed to proceed unchecked, and upon arrival, they discover that the castle has also been leased to the very same group of ladies they had encountered on the road. After some initial grumblings, the sextet reasons that the castle is more than big enough to enable them all to co-exist without actually seeing each other very much, so they agree to share.

The heroine of this story is Abigail Harewood, a vivacious and rather quirky young lady with an impish sense of humour. Unwilling to surrender the independence which has allowed her to indulge her penchant for unconventional behaviour – such as betting on horse races and going for a pint down the pub – she has decided that marriage is not for her but isn’t prepared to miss out on the good bits. She wants to take a lover – and who better for her first one than a man of vast experience who will surely know how to pleasure a woman and who won’t want or expect romantic entanglements or commitment? And what better setting than Italy, the lushly seductive land of love? The fact that Wallingford is gorgeous certainly doesn’t hurt either, and Abigail sets her sights firmly upon him. After all, how hard can it be to persuade a womaniser of such magnitude to seduce her?

Unfortunately for Abigail, when the rake in question has been brought to an understanding of his inadequacies and deficiencies, it’s much more difficult than one might expect.

Wallingford is a complicated, and sometimes unlikeable hero. Born to privilege, he’s a pampered aristocrat who has never had to do a day’s work and whose life has been dedicated to his own wants and desires. But right from the outset, it’s clear that there’s more to him than brainless, selfish arrogance (of which he has plenty, it’s true!) when we learn of the way his relationship with Burke began, and when, later in the book, he and Abigail embark upon a genuine friendship. He’s also really taken the things Olympia said to heart and is gradually admitting the truth of them to himself;

My dear boy … has the entire conduct of your adult life ever suggested your usefulness for anything else?”

– so even though he’s desperately attracted to Abigail, he resists her charms, determined to prove to himself – and everyone else – that he is capable of restraint. Determined he may be, but he’s still plagued by doubts as to whether he will ever be able to be faithful to one woman, doubts he pours out in a very poignant scene towards the end.

In addition to the central romance and the glimpses we get of the other two couples, there is an intriguing touch of the supernatural to this story, which seemed a little odd at first, but which I ended up finding rather charming. Taken as a whole, the story is well-written with plenty of warmth, humour and a touch of whimsy; the characters are well-rounded and there is great chemistry between the leads. There was, however, one thing I really didn’t like, which was the ending. It struck a false note and seemed overly melodramatic. But that said, A Duke Never Yields is still well worth your time if you’re looking for an entertaining romance set away from the ballrooms and soirées of London.

I confess I had a hard time listening to this audiobook for the first few chapters, because I really disliked Ms Dehmlow’s characterisation of Wallingford. I’ve listened to her a few times, and while I’ve had reservations about her performances, they have been competent and, for the most part, enjoyable. But I struggled with this one. Ms Dehmlow is softly spoken and does not have a particularly wide range of timbre and pitch, which means that her hero voices can be disappointing. In this audiobook, she seems to be trying to do something about that, but in what I’m assuming is an attempt to add a bit of masculine gruffness to Wallingford’s voice, he instead sounds as though he has a throat full of phlegm and needs a good cough! The gravelly nature of her portrayal worked quite well for the earlier part of the book when Wallingford is almost always in a bad mood, yet while it may have been an appropriate acting choice, it is nonetheless not particularly pleasant to listen to. Fortunately, however, as the story progresses and Wallingford begins to unbend, the relaxation extends to his voice; and Ms Dehmlow removes the more unpleasant “phlegmy” quality while retaining a little of the earlier gruffness, which aids in differentiating Wallingford from the other male characters.

The female characters are performed well, although it is sometimes necessary to rely on dialogue tags to work out who is who, and the Italian characters are all given accents which are appropriate, but not so thick as to be unintelligible. I enjoy Ms Dehmlow’s narrative voice; she reads with a great deal of expression and humour, and once Wallingford stops behaving – and sounding – like he has a stick up his arse, the whole thing turns into a much more enjoyable listening experience.

Caz