Is it damning with faint praise to say that the last forty percent of this book is relatively intriguing while the first sixty percent is basically plodding and stereotypical? After spending three days trying to get past the first few pages of this book, I gritted my teeth and steeled myself for utter boredom. Ms. Busbee may indeed be a “Grande Dame” of romantic fiction, but her allure escaped me for the first 229 pages of this book. If this is sacrilege, so be it.

Until that page, this reviewer didn’t care if Lovers Forever featured lovers together for one month, one day, or one hour. But then, things started to gel, things settled down, and the story got real. Rather than stereotypical characters, stereotypical plot devices, mistaken identity, amnesia, spying, and smuggling, the primary characters and several secondary characters got together and turned into human beings.

Lovers Forever, set in England at the start of the 19th century, tells the tale of beautiful heiress Lady Tess Mandeville and the rogue Nicolas Talmage, Earl of Shelbourne. She is on the run from her lecherous cousin and he is a man on a secret mission. Both with secrets to hide, fearful of love, they meet and share a night of passion. He asks her to become his mistress (not knowing who she really is). She refuses, so he kidnaps her and sets her up as his mistress, hiding her in a cottage at his country estate.

It is while they are in his cottage and her delightful relatives descend upon them that this story becomes more palatable. Her aunt, great aunt and two uncles, with the humor they bring into the story, changes the tone altogether. His grandmother adds even a bit more texture, although of a more sentimental variety.

Until the relatives turned up, there was no connection between myself and Tess and Nicolas. But after the arrival of Meg, Hetty, Rockwall, Alexander, and Pallas (by the way, Nicolas’ conniving sister’s name is Athena), Tess and Nicolas became more real for me. Not just in how they interacted between the two of them, but in how the “family” operated together and in smaller clusters.

After Tess and Nicolas turned into human beings rather than cardboard cut-outs, and struggle with their feelings, I began to care a bit more about them. The author certainly helped with some scintillating love scenes. Neither was willing to admit to the other their true feelings. When they finally did (at least the author didn’t make me wait until the end), it felt real to me, which is a point in this author’s favor. If only I hadn’t had to wade through so much flotsam and jetsam to get to the good stuff!

Tess and Nicolas are a good match – both are moral, honest, loyal, brave, and kind (although as a rogue Nicolas would hide many of his good qualities). They are also intense, fiery, passionate, and ready to fight the good fight. When they meet up with danger, the reader feels safe in knowing they will survive, which is good, because by this point, the reader does care about them.

If only the author had not cluttered up the first 15 chapters of this book with so many tired characterizations and plot devices. There was enough drama inherent in Tess and Nicolas’ family histories that the first chapters could have been written differently altogether. Had the author done so, I wouldn’t have been gritting my teeth and skimming, skimming, skimming to get to the part of the book that began on page 229, when things “got real”.

I can recommend chapters 16 through 28 as being intriguing and enjoyable to read. I cannot do so about chapters 1 through 15. Since this book is not serialized and to buy the last 13 chapters one has to buy the first 15, I cannot recommend this book. It is too bad, though, because Tess and Nicolas deserve to share their love and their histories with us. Just not in this book.