When informed of her impending marriage the day before, Lady Regina is surprised but resigned… until she meets the groom and discovers he’s a sickly 14-year-old who’s much more horrified by the idea of marriage than she is. Running away is the only escape option she has.
Except it absolutely wasn’t, since she had a loving older brother who would totally have helped her out. Regina was the literal epitome of the too-stupid-to-live heroine and I wanted to strangle her pretty much continuously throughout the book. She was naive and foolish, and not only that, totally disrespectful, repeatedly violating Guthrie’s privacy even after he’d asked her not to just because of her curiosity. I genuinely couldn’t imagine what a man in his thirties (Guthrie is 15 years older than Regina, who’s 18) would see in her. She was a burden he had to continually rescue, not a romantic interest, and I felt really icky about their age gap considering her childlike behaviour.
What kind of nitwit tries on her wedding dress in the middle of the night and then decides to run away with it and absolutely nothing else? And then, weirdly, apparently she couldn’t get out of the dress on her own, even though she’d gotten INTO it on her own. This made about as much sense as the rest of the plot, also riddled with continuity errors and impossible, anachronistic events.
I’ve enjoyed previous works by this author, but I really can’t recommend this one. Two stars.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley.