When your husband dies, leaving you responsible for dear old seriously ill dad and your roguish but lovable servants – when your husband dies and leaves you without funds and at the mercy of the male relative come to claim the estate, what’s a virgin widow (come on, this is an Avon historical after all) to do? Well, when the going gets tough, the tough fake pregnancy. In a desperate bid to keep herself and those who depend upon her from being turned out of their home, Lady Meredith Brookshire hatches a scheme to keep control of the estate from falling into the hands of her late husband’s half brother.

However, when Nicholas Caulfield arrives at Oak Run to claim his estate and title, Meredith finds him to be something more than the ogre she had envisioned. She finds a man who is handsome and decent, not to mention haunted by his past, making Meredith ache to soothe him. Nicholas intrigues her, though she sometimes chafes at his high-handedness. The battle of wills between the two that ensues ranges from the silly to the well-timed and rather intelligent.

Meredith and Nicholas are both fundamentally decent characters and occasionally were interesting to read about. Still, the story is uneven in its execution and the timing is not always quite right. On the stronger side, Jordan does a good job of working some of the grittier details of country life into her story. She also captures the desperation of Meredith’s plight very well. Making a reader believe in Meredith’s madcap plot to prevent Nicholas’ inheritance is no easy task, but Jordan proves herself equal to it.

However, for each of these good points, the story also has significant weaknesses. Nicholas is presented as a tortured hero of sorts but the author reveals his secrets in a rather cursory manner. In addition, while some of his past is revealed to the reader, not all is shared with the heroine. Part of the allure of the tortured hero lies in seeing him come to trust the heroine, share his pain, and find healing with her. By glossing over these things, the author pushes the readers away and makes her characters feel more distant.

In addition, while the setup of this novel contains some inherent conflict, it just goes too far. At first the conflict between the characters is handled well, but it eventually reaches a point where many readers will find themselves thinking “Oh come on, get over it already so we can get a real story going here!” The lack of a sense of history does not help the story either. Details of 19th century country life and a few bits of upper class manners are worked into the book, but that is about the extent of it. The reader is told that the story takes place in 1835, but the story, with its mentions of the Season and the ton reads more like a Regency. The editor’s letter on the back of my ARC even calls this a Regency-set historical – never mind that the Regency ended in 1820 and George IV (Prinny) himself died in 1830.

Jordan has some definite strengths as an author. This is her debut novel and with some polishing, she could do quite well. When she allows herself to get deep inside her characters’ minds, she can write a very emotional story. However, the pacing and charactertization of this novel were simply too uneven to garner a recommendation this time.