If You’re Missing Downton Abbey…. Here’s 20+ Historical Romance Reads from Australian Authors You Must Read! p2
The Devilish Duke
Maddison Michaels
Devlin Markham, the notorious “Devil Duke” of Huntington, needs a woman. And not just any woman. If he can’t woo one of the most eccentric bluestockings of the Ton within the month, he can kiss his hard-earned fortune goodbye. But he’s always thought love a wasted emotion and marriage an inconvenience at best. And oddly enough, Lady Sophie Wolcott seems unmoved by his charm…
When Sophie learns her beloved orphanage is in imminent danger, she will do anything to save it. Even marry a ruthless rake who takes what he wants in business and pleasure. A man who’s everything she’s always feared most—but whom she reluctantly begins yearning for.
Then Sophie becomes the target of a killer lurking from the dark shadows of Devlin’s past. And they find not only their lives in jeopardy but their very hearts.
Marry In Scandal
Anne Gracie
Shy young heiress, Lady Lily Rutherford, is in no hurry to marry. She dreams of true love and a real courtship. But when disaster strikes, she finds herself facing a scandal-forced marriage to her rescuer, Edward Galbraith, a well known rake.
Despite his reputation Lily is drawn to the handsome Galbraith. In the gamble of her life, she agrees to marry him, hoping to turn a convenient marriage into a love match.
As heir to a title, Galbraith knows he must wed, so a convenient marriage suits him perfectly. But there is a darkness in his past, and secrets he refuses to share with his tender-hearted young bride. All Lily’s efforts to get close to him fall on stony ground, and in desperation she retreats to his childhood home–the place he’s avoided for nearly a decade.
Must Lily reconcile herself to a marriage without love? Or will Galbraith realize that this warm-hearted, loving girl is the key to healing the wounds of his past-and his heart?
The Seduction of Lord Stone
Anna Campbell
Caroline, Lady Beaumont, arrives in London seeking excitement after ten dreary years of marriage and an even drearier year of mourning. That means conquering society, dancing like there’s no tomorrow, and taking a lover to provide passion without promises. Promises, in this dashing widow’s dictionary, equal prison. So what is an adventurous lady to do when she loses her heart to a notorious rake who, for the first time in his life, wants forever?
Devilish Silas Nash, Viscount Stone is in love at last with a beautiful, headstrong widow bent on playing the field. Worse, she’s enlisted his help to set her up with his disreputable best friend. No red-blooded man takes such a challenge lying down, and Silas schemes to seduce his darling into his arms, warm, willing and besotted. But will his passionate plots come undone against a woman determined to act the mistress, but never the wife?
Moonstone Conspiracy
Elizabeth Ellen Carter
Revolution in France, rebels in England, and one woman caught in the crossfire…
The powerful sequel to Moonstone Obsession
For her unwitting participation in a plot to embezzle the Exchequer, Lady Abigail Houghall has spent the last two years exiled to the city of Bath. A card sharp, sometime mistress, and target of scandalous gossip by the London Beau Monde, Lady Abigail plots to escape her gilded cage as well as the prudish society that condemns her.
But the times are not easy. France is in chaos, the King has been executed, and whispers of a similar revolution are stirring in England. And because of Abigail’s participation in the robbery plot, the Spymaster of England is blackmailing her into passing him information about the members of London’s upper crust.
When dashing English spy Daniel Ridgeway takes a seat at her card table and threatens to expose her for cheating, Abigail has no choice but to do as he demands: seduce the leader of the revolutionaries and learn what she can about their plot. As she’s drawn deeper into Daniel’s dangerous world—from the seedy backstreets of London to the claustrophobic catacombs of a war-torn Paris—she realizes an even more dangerous fact: she’s falling in love with her seductive partner. And the stakes of this game might just be too high—even for her.
The Blue Rose
Kate Forsyth
Viviane de Faitaud has grown up alone at the Chateau de Belisama-sur-le-Lac in Brittany, for her father, the Marquis de Ravoisier, lives at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles. After a hailstorm destroys the chateau’s orchards, gardens and fields an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan the chateau’s new gardens in the hope of making his name as a landscape designer.
David and Viviane fall in love, but it is an impossible romance. Her father has betrothed her to a rich duke who she is forced to marry and David is hunted from the property. Viviane goes to court and becomes a maid-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette and a member of the extended royal family. Angry and embittered, David sails away from England with Lord Macartney, the British ambassador, who hopes to open up trade with Imperial China.
In Canton, the British embassy at last receives news from home, including their first reports of the French Revolution. David hears the story of ‘The Blue Rose’, a Chinese fable of impossible love, and discovers the blood-red rose growing in the wintry garden. He realises that he is still in love with Viviane and must find her.
Viviane escapes the guillotine and returns to the ruin of Chateau de Belisima to rebuild her life. David carrying a cluster of rosehips finds her there, and together they decide to grow the fabled red rose of China in France.
The Laird’s Troubled Bride
Erin Grace
What if your life was a lie?
When Isabelle Barclay is left widowed and alone she discovers a horrifying truth, and just how precarious life in the 1850’s can be. Surrounded by sycophantic friends who fear her and treacherous men intent on having her, she is faced with a dismal future. Rescued by an unlikely ally with her own secret past, she escapes to find solace in the beautiful but wild Scottish Highlands.
What she didn’t expect was an evil man’s revenge, a treasured friendship found and falling for a Scottish Laird who is determined never to love. A stormy, passionate affair and a midnight duel will change Isabelle’s life forever.
Once revealed, will the secrets that brought them together help them find love or will the truth tear them apart?
Behind the Courtesan
Bronwyn Stuart
When courtesan Sophia Martin returns to the village she fled as a young woman, she knows it won’t be a happy reunion—but she can’t refuse her brother’s request to attend his expectant wife. Trapped until the baby arrives, she must navigate the social rift she caused when she left to pursue a disreputable life—and keep the true reason for her departure from the man she once loved, the bastard son of the Duke who ruined her.
Blake Vale has never forgotten Sophia, but he can’t accept the decisions she made, the courtesan’s life she leads, or the fact she’s cast aside her true self. Plain old Sophia has to be inside this hardened woman somewhere, and he’s determined to make her see she doesn’t need rich men to be happy, and that their future has nothing to do with the past.
When the dukedom suddenly falls within his reach, Blake must come to terms with his own past and his birthright, and what that means for his future…and Sophia.
From France, with Love
Tamara Gill
She was banished from England…and she banished him from her heart.
Upon her return to England following her father’s death, Miss Ava Knight becomes the owner of one of the largest racehorse estates in the country. There’s only one problem: the future of the estate requires a strong breeding program with the services of a stallion named, Titan. A shame that the horse is owned by a man she swore to never see again.
The Duke of Whitstone, Tate Wells, was heartbroken when Ava abandoned him on the night of their elopement, and he vowed to never lay eyes on Ava again. Despite Tate’s unwillingness to forgive Ava, she comes to his aid during a deliberately lit fire at his estate. Someone is determined to destroy them. Now, the two are forced to work together to ensure the safety of their horses and their homes. Will their previous feelings for each other rekindle their love, or will their feelings stall out at the starting gates?
The Viscount’s Pleasure House
Suzi Love
Lady Chrissie Wellsby and her two country friends research dozens of rogues before selecting the notorious Viscount Hawkesbury, owner of London’s most exclusive and expensive brothel, to educate them in erotic seduction. The ladies abandon respectability and coerce Justin Tremayne into letting them visit The Pleasure House and to teaching them the sensual tricks mistresses and prostitutes use to entertain men.
Though Justin believes three naive ladies will see the debauched romps in his themed rooms, cover their eyes and ears, and run back to their sheltered lives, he underestimates the desperation of abandoned women who imagine a wider knowledge of sex will keep the men in their lives at home, in their own beds. But despite watching several of their friends, men and women, perform raunchy acts at his brothel, the ladies insist on participating in the last of Justin’s infamous Sultan’s galas, held in numerous silk tents and outdoor bathing areas on his estate.
Justin concedes to Chrissie’s demands only to gain information about his long-lost mother and sisters, but the world-weary viscount falls head over heels in love with his emotionally bruised pupil. He yearns for a wife, children, and an uncomplicated wife, but can he convinced Chrissie to take a chance and marry again? Because Justin never wants to leave her bed.
Masquerade
Nicole Hurley-Moore
To the outside world she’s referred to as Lord Tressely’s child bride – but nothing could be further from the truth.
Sophia’s entire life is a lie. For her protection she has hidden within a sham of a marriage for years. In a desperate gamble to save all that she loves and repay a debt of kindness to her dying husband, Sophia must produce an heir.
A night of passion is all she wants and the masquerade ball may be the opportunity she’s been looking for. An illicit tryst with the wickedly handsome Lord Mathias Eldridge appears to be the answer to her prayers. What she didn’t expect was for Mathias to spin her senses and make her wish for a different life.
But Sophia discovers that the repercussions of her actions could threaten to destroy not only her entire world but also her heart.
A Scandalous Wager
Cassandra Samuels
As the Black Raven, she’s cold, distant and alone…untouched by the gossip and scorn of her aristocratic peers. Until he enters her house — and her life — then suddenly her icy shell is no match for the heat of attraction…
Notorious Widow Lisbeth Carslake, Countess of Blackhurst was acquitted of her husband’s murder, but no one believes in her innocence. Known as the Black Raven, bringer of bad luck and death, she is eviscerated by the gossips and mocked in the clubs.
She’s also the subject of London’s most scandalous wager.
Oliver Whitely, Earl of Bellamy, needs money, but it takes more than a few drinks to take on The Black Raven Wager. He finds himself drunk, at her house, and—more surprisingly—agreeing to a business proposal at the end of a fire poker.
She will let him win the wager, and he will help find her husband’s killer before the killer finds her. But business agreements don’t mean trust, and Lisbeth certainly doesn’t trust Oliver, her body’s reaction to him, or her heart.
Love may be the biggest gamble of their lives, but is it a wager their hearts can afford to lose?
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