Under the Covers with Paul Marron: the Golden Age!

When last we left our hero Paul Marron, he had overcome a disastrous fashion mis-step and gone back to his roots, as it were, to find renewal and new hope. Romance had rekindled in his supermodel heart, and the Romance world had begun to reciprocate, with a vengeance. Traditionally, Romance novel covers displayed the customary imaginative partition: there was a beautiful young woman in the process of being enraptured, and there was a handsome young man doing the enrapturing. During the puritanical 80s and 90s, book cover designers were chary of having their products look like actual snapshots from mid-coitus, so the positions these young couples tended to take were more athletic than functional (one - unintended? - side-effect was that often on those covers it looks like the handsome young man is rapturing the beautiful young woman ... er, Brokeback Mountain-style), but both sides of the Romance equation were accounted for. Women (and, presumably, one out of every ten men) reading these novels could either fantasize about being that ravished heroine, or they could fantasize about being ravished by that handsome young man.

Our boy Paulie changed all that. Cover designers were clearly overwhelmed by the sheer Kelvin-range of his cheeky smolder, the tectonic pout of his lips, the sexy swivel of his svelte shoulders. They discovered that when Paul Marron, sultry and perhaps a bit dishevelled, is glaring out at you from the cover of a Romance novel, he's actively fulfilling both fantasies at once - he balances the equation all by himself. Soon, dozens of Paul Marron covers were appearing every month in bookstores across the country, all sporting variously manipulated images of Paul - and only Paul. For the first time since the era of Fabio, a male model was judged sufficient to sell a Romance novel to women without any women on the cover. Who needs direct imaginative identification when you've got those intense Italian eyes lasering into you?

Kresley Cole realized this early on, and the cover of her 2008 entry in her "Immortals After Dark" series shows it! There's our boy - in this case, masquerading as a full-fledged demon (complete with forehead-horns!) by the name of Cadeon Woede, who manages to become erotically fascinated by the mortal woman Holly Ashwin even as supernatural forces conspire to reveal that she's the chosen Vessel, so called because every 500 years a woman is fated to give birth to a child who'll change the otherworldly balance of power for good or evil (yep, the female lead is called a vessel, and it turns out super-macho para-military demons like Paul can only really tell if a woman is destined to be his by sleeping with her ... this isn't a fantasy novel aimed at Gloria Steinem's night-stand). He abducts poor Holly and, um, auditions her rather strenuously, and in the course of the book she discovers that she herself isn't what she seems ... yet another exponent of the disturbing Twilight-ethos in which a young woman can only achieve self-awareness through getting rogered good and proper by a man. Although at least in this case the man was a sturdy little super-model and not a mush-faced bent-chested little Gothling ...

We go from primal supernatural fantasy to primal supernatural fantasy by turning next to Pamela Palmer's "Feral Warriors" novel Desire Untamed, which features a truly astounding cover-image of our hero in mid-crouch, buck-naked except for a lion-head arm-band. Palmer, wise woman that she is, clearly has a thing for Paul - he's appeared on a number of her book-covers, but never to more mesmerizing effect than here: caught in steamy red, muscles taut, eyes glowing, hair unabashedly Fabio-esque. In this book Paul goes by the name of Lyon, the leader of a band of Feral Warriors, the Therians, who are seeking a woman - a woman they call the Radiant, who's destined to renew their fading race (three guesses how)(sigh). Unbeknownst to her, that woman is ordinary every-day preschool teacher Kara MacAllister, who discovers in the course of the book that she herself isn't what she seems ... so yes, Palmer and Cole have essentially written the same book, with our boy Paul doing double-duty as both a sexy demon and an enormous house-cat. But the point is: look at that cover! In many ways, it's unlike any Romance cover seen before: not only is it explicitly erotic in ways that all that Brokeback Mountaineering couldn't hope to be, but it's explicitly personal - directed squarely at the reader in open invitation. It's instantly one of the very best Paul Marron covers of all time.

Urban fantasy gives way to science fiction in Susan Kearney's Rion, the second instalment in her "Pendragon Legacy" series. Here Paul goes by the name of, you guessed it, Rion, a half-breed space explorer from the planet Honor who kidnaps sexy human telepath Marisa Rourke because she unwittingly holds the key to the salvation of his ... OK, OK. So it's just possible there's a trade-off going on here. It's possible this astounding new level of Paul Marron covers comes at a price - not just to Gloria Steinem but to women everywhere, who are here reading adventure after adventure of female main characters who have no clue about their capabilities or even identities until those things are revealed to them, through sex, by a sultry Paul-avatar. And the Paul-avatar uses the (allegedly) affectionate adjective 'little' in conjunction with her name/title for the whole book. And the sex happens because she's been abducted and sprawled forcibly on the bed/chamber floor/forest sward/starship bridge. OK, OK, so this trend is pretty bad. But again: look at that cover! This one takes the Marron Gamble to new levels: there's nothing promised here except the promises implied by our hero's stunning face. That's a far cry from horny Brazilian millionaires.

We come right back down to Earth for Stephanie Tyler's Hard to Hold, in which Paul appears as Lieutenant Jake Hansen, hard-bitten (and yet gorgeous!) Navy SEAL who's ordered to darkest Africa to spirit feisty, sexy Dr. Isabelle Markham out of harm's way. Since he's ordered to do this with or without her cooperation, we're talking about our fourth abduction in just this one entry, although at least nobody's expecting poor Isabelle to save an entire planet (or are they?). And the cover doesn't disappoint: there's our boy, steamily glancing off to his right, sweaty torso clad in a tight tank top, taut little chest sporting Special Op dog-tags, handsome face drawn to sharp, intense focus. Pre-Marron, such a cover would have been unthinkable - cover-editors would have said it lacked any kind of story-line. And they'd have been right: any other model couldn't manage to convey a story-line simply by pouting there. But this particular model has been forged, as we've seen, in countless adventures - he's known apocalyptic wastelands, English country villas, immortal vampire-queens, and more than a few tightly-bound perils, and he's emerged from them all with a cover-confidence never seen before in the Romance world.

Where will it take him, you wonder? Why, to a series of ever-more-satisfying climaxes, of course! We'll seize on one in our next thrilling chapter!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: the Warren Court!

Perhaps growing weary of his life as a multi-millionaire shape-shifting bounty-hunting alien werewolf bondage slave (yeesh - who wouldn't grow weary of all that from time to time?), our hero Paul for a brief while returned to Merrie Olde England where he'd been relatively happy once before. And what more natural identity to assume once in England of 1809 than that of Lord Byron?

In truth, it was only a matter of time. Our Paul shares so many traits in common with Byron, after all - stunning physical beauty, identical height and body type, same husky, suggestive timbre to the voice, same compact yet fluid physicality, same studied-yet-involuntary sensual appeal (and perhaps one or two other things that slip the mind at the moment). For the better part of a decade, Byron held a wide reputation for being the most handsome man in England. The amazing thing is that it took romance writers so long to make the connection.

And the wait isn't over yet, because the Byron our Paul turns out to be this time around isn't that Lord Byron - he's Lord Cade Byron, one of the brothers of the Duke of Clybourne, and like all his brothers, Paul - er, Cade - probably spends half his waking hours telling people he's not related to the famous poet. But although they're not related, the Byron brothers share something of the poet's mythos - they're headstrong and provocative (well, all except for egghead brother Drake, although even he has his moments), and they often choose to be snidely dismissive of the great society's norms. Also, like the poet, they attract trouble and temptresses in equal measure.

In other words, we've entered the world of Tracy Anne Warren, who writes some of the most charmingly escapist Regency romances currently on the market, and whose covers had a brief, torrid affair with our chisel-cheeked hero back in 2009, starting with Tempted by His Kiss, which opens with pretty young orphan Meg Amberley seeking shelter from a blinding snowstorm at the remote estate of the aforementioned Lord Cade Byron. Cade is holed up away from the convivial haunts of his family, brooding over his capture and torture on the Continent six months earlier at the hands of a French agent known as Le Renard. Paul only barely escaped from that encounter, and he's sequestered himself in his northern estate to let his scars (and his crippled leg) heal and generally feel sorry for himself. Meg's arrival jars him out of his reverie, and soon he's back in London - where he's shocked to recognize Lord Everett, the hero of the hour, as his former torturer. Of course nobody believe him - except perhaps Meg, and it isn't long before the two of them are facing Everett's loaded pistol, and Paul is getting a treatment that seems a bit familiar:

Everett motioned Cade toward the chair. For a moment he looked as if he might resist, but a glance at the gun Everett was still pointing her way obviously changed his mind. Moving with a more pronounced limp than he had shown for a while, Cade crossed the room, pausing to lean his cane against the nearby wall before taking a seat. At the servant's urging, Cade placed his hands around the tall back of the chair so his wrists could be tied together using a stout length of rope. Nearly finished, the man gave a last, hard tug that made Cade's muscles visibly tense against the strain.

Readers of this series will recognize the tenor of revelations about Cade/Paul. "He knew all about how it felt to lose control," Warren tells us. "To be denied free will while one trembled on the brink, a second shy of breaking, of begging, of agreeing to violate one's most sacred oaths in order to make the agony stop..."

Yes indeed!

With admirable flexibility, Paul has no sooner conquered the villain (the old knife-up-the-frilly-sleeve trick that's no doubt got him out of many a tight spot in Brooklyn) and taken the girl in his arms than he's pivoting, dodging into the nearest storeroom, and emerging as ... an entirely different Byron brother!

In Seduced by His Touch, Paul is going by the name Lord Jack Byron, a wastrel who falls so deeply into debt to a wealthy London merchant that he has no choice but to agree to marry the man's daughter Grace in exchange for a clean slate. Naturally, Paul worries that this Grace has gone unmarried all this time because she's, as he puts it, a "gorgon," but the truth turns out to be far more pleasant, as romance novel truths invariably do (Warren, who can't keep her sunny native ebullience out of her prose even at its most serious, writes infectiously happy books, despite the brutal backdrops of some of her plots). He finds her charming, and of course she returns the favor:

Glancing across the room, she found him talking with Edward and Cade. The three Byron men were all handsome, but to her, Jack far outshone his siblings. He was the epitome of masculine beauty, standing tall, dark, and dynamic in his stark black and white evening attire, his neatly combed hair already showing a charmingly rebellious bit of wave.

And lest you think Paul's quick identity change frees him from the family duty of constantly clarifying, think again:

Her aunt's eyes grew round. "Byron? No relation to the poet, I suppose?"

"No, ma'am. That particular gentleman and I share no familial ties, nor do I claim to have so much as an inkling of talent in the art of penning sonnets and odes. Let me say, however, that it is a distinct pleasure to make your acquaintance." He bowed with a practiced flair that made her aunt's cheeks pink like a schoolgirl's despite her nearly sixty years.

Ah, our Paul! Such a charmer! Where will he turn up next?

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Frilly Shirt, Discarded!

When last we left our hero Paul (now the proprietor of a snazzy new website of his own! Those of you who are casting directors - and you know who you are - click on over and line up to offer him work!), he was beginning to grasp once again that elemental poutiness that launched him to romance-cover stardom, after perhaps losing faith for a time and finding solace, as we've all done from time to time, by taking mercenary work in distant galaxies and doing some freelance paranormal gigs in New York City. Those stints offered an anonymity that was no doubt healing, but they required a heavy price in return: they required Paul to be fully clothed. For a male model, a pound of body armor and worsted wool is far worse than a pound of flesh. Paul may have executed these various adventures with the cool hand and consummate professionalism that are his trademarks, but looking at those covers, you can almost hear his luscious pecs yearning to break out and breathe free. We saw the beginnings of that self-realization dawn on Paul last time, and what started as a trickle will soon spurt to a torrent.

Like so many epic adventures, it all begins in Egypt. 1820 Egypt, to be specific, the setting for the opening scene of the delightful Deb Marlowe's 2008 Harlequin historical romance An Improper Aristocrat, which begins with a mysterious femme fatale spying on our Paul as he sits alone in his tent in the Valley of Kings. Her motives might be nefarious, but she's an excellent judge of model-meat:

Narrowing her gaze, she studied him. Ah, yes. The light might be dim, but it illuminated a feast for the discerning female eye: a strong, chiselled profile, impossibly broad shoulders, rugged muscles straining the fine linen of his shirt.

He set down his pen and indulged himself in a lengthy, catlike stretch. Even in so unwary a pose, she could sense his power, feel the pull of unwavering confidence and absolute masculinity. Inwardly, she smiled. This assignment, which she had objected to with vehemence, was going to be no hardship at all.

Ah, yes indeed - she no sooner parts his tent-flap than she's straddling him like a subway turnstile, and our boy Paul, bless his randy soul, takes it all in stride. Howard Carter and other wimpy Egyptologists would probably have complained about the heat.

Their impromptu coupling is brought to an abrupt halt by the sound of a scream, and Paul - here calling himself the Earl of Treyford - rushes outside to find his excavation partner, Richard Latimer, lying on the ground with a knife sticking out of his chest. Despite the fact that 'Trey' (the equivalent of the Earl of Rutland calling himself 'Rut,' but Marlowe - like her literary namesake, come to think of it - will have her own way) cries out the requisite "No!" Richard dies in his arms - but not before handing over a mysterious ancient amulet and making Paul swear to return to England and protect Richard's big sister Chione.

Paul swears (in all his adventures so far, he's never yet refused a dying request, despite the fact that they always get him into trouble - you'd think by this point he wouldn't bend over a dying friend until his iPod was safely blasting Lady Gaga into his ears, so his friend could gurgle impossible quests until the cows come home without Paul being the wiser), even though he has no love for England - where polite society views him as an unprincipled rake and adventurer - and no love for the idea of playing squire to some old maid and the two children she chaperones.

Needless to say, Chione in the flesh upends all his expectations (Marlowe is wonderful at crafting set-piece scenes that come off without a hitch; the chapter-section where Paul meets Chione is a pitch-perfect hoot, complete with a zinger at the end), and thanks to that mysterious amulet - and the sinister ancient society that's after it - the two of them are quickly embroiled in one adventure after another. Readers who expect the usual dinner-and-ball-room Regency romance here will be surprised right out of their petticoats. As noted, Paul himself must wrestle with similarly toppled expectations - and other, more powerful feelings:

Trey muffled a heartfelt curse. His head was still bent in the low-ceilinged corridor, an awkward position made more so by the child resting against his shoulder. Danger lay behind and the unknown ahead, and he must face it saddled with a woman and two children. This was hardly the first scrape he'd found himself in, but it ranked right up there with the worst of the lot. And despite all this, still his body reacted to the nearness of hers. To the scent of her hair. To the sound of her breathing in the darkness. For some reason he did not fully comprehend, all of this infuriated him.

Ah, that last line speaks volumes, doesn't it? And in the end what's important isn't that inexplicable rage - that's just par for the course when it comes to brooding rakehells, after all - but rather the fact that by this point in our odyssey, we can bloody well guess why Paul is infuriated. Hell, we can see it plain as day! The old Harlequin historicals (four a month, no overlapping time-periods!) all featured a separate black-and-white illustration on the inside cover that was meant to further the action of the full-color front cover, and in the case of An Improper Aristocrat, we can see the way the wind is blowing - it's blowing Paul's frilly shirt clean off his smooth-muscled torso!

That wind is the breath of the future, and it's blowing Paul toward his romance-cover destiny! We shall follow that blowing job in the next instalment!

Under the Covers with ... who?

Several card-holding members of the Silent Majority have written to make sure I know that our intrepid hero, Paul Marron, is not the only good-looking young man to appear on a long series of Romance covers. Of course Fabio has been mentioned, as well as less corpulent but no less magnificent figures such as Steve Sandalis or Frank Sepe and a host of others.

Given the fact that I've been selling these things since the reign of James I, this information naturally came as no surprise to me - although I'm always grateful to know that people are reading Stevereads! Yes, Paul Marron isn't the only guy who's made a nice little side-career in prettying up the real estate of Romance covers, and while I'm naturally partial to my guy (I realize these things are tricky to quantify, but I'm prepared to assert that I've settled on the best-looking young man to show up repeatedly on paperback covers), the point serves to bring up an interesting tangent to our little adventure ongoing adventure story here. Because the Steve Sandalises and the Frank Sepes and the Fabios are of course the rarity even in today's publicity-hungry days. In the blissful 72 years of the mass market paperback's existence, thousands of handsome men (and a surprisingly number of those who were most certainly otherwise - hope springs eternal, I guess, although the gambit looks considerably more pathetic when removed from the low lighting and alcoholic haze of the bar...) have graced book covers and gone entirely uncredited.

This has been intentional, naturally: publishers want their models to be anonymous so readers can mentally substitute themselves into the fanciful scenarios of those covers. The opposite effect is achieved if you put somebody with name-recognition into those images - then readers can't help but just think of that person (Daniel Radcliffe, Jared Padalecki, or whomever), and a significant element of wish-fulfillment is aborted. Plus, anonymous comes a bit cheaper than name-brand.

And yet, an irony attends - because some of those anonymous faces catch on - readers like them and want to see more of them. They're still anonymous (most of the time - faithful readers of Romantic Times will still be in the know, but most supermarket shoppers will just think "Oh, it's that guy! I like him!"), but they're obviously somehow conducive to fantasy. Some young men just have that kind of face - and the body doesn't hurt either.

So you have the odd situation of many, many young guys becoming well-known while remaining anonymous. Stroll down the aisles of any Annie's Book Stop and you'll see handsome face after handsome face - all without even so much as a paltry cover-credit.

Our young man today is one such candidate out of thousands. He's been on many dozens of covers - fans have obviously called for him - and yet he's no household name, no Fabio, no Frank Sepe ... and certainly no Paul Marron.

He has his preferences, as we can see, his preferences and his types. He's fairer-haired than our Paul, with a longer and less pouting face and a nose only a handsome young man could carry off at all. He has soulful, accessible eyes - not the dark pits of sultry menace our Paul has. And he smiles - indeed, he looks like the type who has to be told not to smile - and not just the occasional wry "I'm going to bed you without even telling you who I am" cocky half-grin of our Paul but the open, sunny smile of the American Midwest. This young man could not pose with a whip or a broadsword, and one suspects he doesn't even own a pair of leather pants.

And he's very likely not as chiseled as our Paul (although to be fair, who is?); I've seen him on dozens of covers, but never, to the best of my recollection, topless (or anything-else-less) and seldom even in a clingy T-shirt. In fact, he's a favorite of ample clothing – the vests and ruffled-shirts of the Regency period, or else a rancher's big fleecy jacket. All we need to do is recall how utterly miserable our Paul looked when sensibly layered to guess we're dealing with a completely different personality here.

Well, perhaps not completely different – our anonymous interloper clearly shares something of Paul's sexual voracity! The somewhat ridiculous cover to Criminally Handsome is the only one I've ever seen in which he's alone, and virtually every time he has female company, he's got designs on that company. Designs, and a signature move – he's doing that not-so-subtle hand-slide in almost every setting, a wonderful gesture that's both assertive and non-threatening. It's smooth; one can't help but think our Paul would approve, even though he'd never stoop to being so polite himself.

But who is this young man? Although I'm certain there are people out there in the wilds of the Internet who know him (hell, maybe he's got a blog of his own … perhaps even, gulp, a book-blog), I certainly don't. In this instance, I'm in the exact same position as any other random reader: I see these covers, and I say “Oh, that guy! I like him!” He doesn't seem to be working in the industry anymore, but for a while there, he was almost as ubiquitous as our Paul.

Speaking of whom! When we last left our hero, he was being tied up and shackled with abandon by a voluptuous vampire queen – and learning to like it. But this seemed to trouble him, and there were hints of a backlash on the horizon. Tune in next time to learn all about it!

Put up your Dukes!

Several of you have written (privately, of course - wouldn't want to clutter up the Comments field with anything so unseemly as comments, now would we?) with questions about our tumultuous ongoing inquiry, Under the Covers with Paul Marron. The questions have taken a variety of forms, from those of you naughty enough to wonder if I myself have had the pleasure of wrapping that taut little model-body in sturdy clothesline to those of you who've questioned whether or not Paul and I might be sampling the Love That Dare Not Pout Its Name. Prurience, it seems, is the currency of the Internet. Shocking.

But one of the more presentable questions has concerned not so much flexible muscles as flexible reading: do my indefatigable researches for Under The Covers constitute the whole of my sojourns in the Romance genre?

This one I can answer: not so! Not hardly! More romance novels are published every year than any other kind of fiction, and more of them have been published in the past than any other genre, even murder mysteries - even westerns. Whole bookshops are devoted to their resale (like my beloved Annie's, but also many more, a species of bookshop once chronicled for the Romantic Times by my erstwhile colleague Rebekah Bradford), and sports arenas could be filled to the cheap seats with slim, florid-covered novels who came, sold in their hundreds, and vanished in a season. Unlike science fiction or even murder mysteries (to a criminally lesser extent), romances do not linger - the genre has fielded virtually no 'classics' of the type that stick around, constantly re-packaged for new generations of readers. The books are mostly chaff - here today and tomorrow in the fire.

The reason is social conventions, of which romance as a subject has multitudes, murder mysteries far fewer, and science fiction by definition almost none. Social conventions change quickly, sometimes multiple times in one generation, and romance novels based on those conventions quickly lose their appeal. It's assumed by most publishers that the virtuous nurses of Betty Neals' romance novels of the early 20th century can have little to say to the raunchy vampire grrrrls of the early 21st.

The great exception, for obvious reasons, is the historical novel. Set your torrid romance in the present day and you'll be the curator of a period piece faster than you can say "Peyton Place." Set the same story in the Middle Ages, and your book could outlast its contemporaries by a season or two. The few romance novels that have ever managed to live on and get reprinted have almost all been historical novels, and despite the ubiquity of those raunchy vampires, a great percentage of romance novels published every year take place in Ye Olden Times.

This leads, of course, to some fairly hilarious anachronisms, as anybody who's ever relished John Mortimer's pitch-perfect story "Rumpole and the Bubble Reputation" will recall. But some writers at least try to do their due diligence, making a heroic effort to sort out things like wall-sconces and crusades and the Ton before they start with the heavy breathing. And to be honest, sometimes the anachronisms fall by the wayside when the story is good enough - or when the author is (not one critic pointed out the six things that couldn't possibly have happened in Wolf Hall, for instance - including me).

Or when the subject is - in our case today, the over-mighty subject. Yes, we're talking about Dukes, those rarest and mightiest of English peers. In the real world, there've been hardly any dukes in history, only about 500 or so total individuals, and in the world today there are fewer than 25 still alive (I myself have only met a baker's dozen of the creatures over the years, and I've only known two of them well). But you'd never know that from reading romance novels, where you can hardly unfurl a reticule without rapping a duke across the snout (Duchesses are almost equally common, as those of you will know who recall my love of Eloisa James' novels)(including one, as you can see, that sports a now-familiar face!). Take three relatively recent reads of mine, harvested from the close-packed aisles of dear Annie's.

From 2004 we have Adele Ashworth's Duke of Sin - the Duke in question here being William Raleigh, Duke of Trent, Earl of Shreveport and Kayes, Baron Chesterfield ... and husband of Elizabeth, the wife he'd been rumored to have murdered. It's 1856, and this Duke is situated in lovely Cornwall (where no dukes at all live in real life), and he's the object of the widow Vivian Rael-Lamont's unwilling attentions. Unwilling and coerced: at the novel's start, Mrs. Rael-Lamont is approached by an actor (an actor!) with an irresistible offer - if she uses her considerable feminine wiles to filch from the Duke of Trent his prized manuscript of an unknown Shakespeare sonnet, the scheming actor won't publish to the world that her husband is ... still living! And this is the key to the historical's appeal: even in Grace Metalious' day, such a bit of blackmail would have no force at all: publish and be damned, and all that. But if you set a thing in the past, all kinds of naivete become believable, and so poor Vivian sets off for the Duke's library, about which we're told, "Despite the fact that the library had been decorated in a purely masculine flavor, as befit a library, this one was simply gorgeous." The predictable complications ensue, but Ashworth keeps it all controlled and carefully moving, right up to the intensely foreseeable ending. No pronouncements about Dukes as a breed are made by Duke of Sin, and this one particular duke turns out to be not so bad a chap.

Quite the reverse seems to be true of the title character in 2006's The Decadent Duke by the redoubtable Virginia Henley. Here the aristocrat in question is the Duke of Bedford, although from the rather opulent cover illustration, you might think he was the Duke of Soloflex. Whatever the designation, it's him and his dashing younger brother who have Lady Georgina Gordon's interests peaked:

"John Russell? He's the Duke of Bedford's younger brother," Charlotte said. "The Russell brothers were orphaned at an early age and brought up by their grandparents, the Marquis and Marchioness of Tavistock. Strange how dissimilar brothers can turn out to be. Marriage is anathema to Bedford, yet John couldn't wait. Against his grandmother's express wishes, he wed Elizabeth Byng in Brussels when he was only nineteen. He was a young ensign in the Footguards, and fought in Belgium."

"Speaking of grandmothers, Elizabeth Byng's grandmere was a Lennox," Charles remarked. "So John's wife is a distant relation of mine."

"Lud, I wouldn't be surprised if the entire British aristocracy were related through intermarriage," Charlotte said dryly.

And indeed, genealogy is paramount in The Decadent Duke in a more technical and researched way than you'll usually find in a romance of this kind. Real historical characters by the dozen flit through Henley's pages, whereas the typical hisotorical romance exists in a happy Trollopean kind of abstraction whose main appeal is its freedom from the need to research. Of course, as noted, the end result of that freedom can be full of annoying howlers, but you can't let that ruin your fun. And if we're talking about fun, we should certainly close things for today by reaching for the lady whose books epitomize it: the aforementioned Eloisa James, whose novels fizz and bubble like fine champagne. James has written a sparkling series of novels starring various high-spirited duchesses, but in her 2006 novel The Taming of the Duke it's the male of the species in the spotlight, namely Rafe, the Duke of Holbrook - and his recently-revealed brother Gabe:

"Raphael and Gabriel," Rafe said. "Bloody hell. I had no idea."

Suddenly the rather serious set of his brother's face shifted to a grin. "The discovery that you are name for an archangel drove you to curses?"

It was in his smile that Rafe found the difference between his brother's face and his own. For Gabriel Spenser's grin had a charming seriousness to it that had never been part of Rafe's personality.

"What could our father have been thinking?" Rafe demanded. And then he caught, lightning quick, the shift of his brother's eyes that showed he knew perfectly well what the old duke had been thinking. "Next thing you'll be telling me Holbrook dandled you on his knee."

"Only until age eight or so," Mr. Spenser said, adding with a touch of something like prudence, "Your Grace."

"Bloody hell," Rafe repeated, "And don't call me Your Grace. I've never taken to the title."

James knows her facts well enough to know only dukes, of all the British aristocracy, are called "Your Grace" instead of "My Lord," but her main focus in this book, as in all her books, is to provide the perfect hour's amusement. You can tell this even by her chapter headings, like "A Chapter In Which Brazen Jokes About Holes Would Be Appropriate (But Your Author Refrains)" - here's an author with no greater ambition than to please you (and perhaps provoke a wistful sigh)(because she's a great big softy). And since every age has its cares, these delightful historicals deserve to survive, although the odds are against it.

I'll keep reading them, just as I'll keep ranging far and wide over the field of romance (and most other genres, of course) - but it's true: lately, my concentration has been focused on a the fictional odyssey of a certain Italian-extraction male model. We'll return to that odyssey all the more refreshed, I think, from having detoured just briefly into the world of dukes and duchesses.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Scarlet!

Just when we might have been fearing for Paul – just when we might have been wondering (and perhaps he wondered too? Do pouty super-models wonder about the future, or do they live in the perpetual present?) if our hero was fated to helm multi-national corporations and woo unconvincingly unwilling secretaries for the rest of his shelf-life – along came just the change he was waiting for, and all it took was the Apocalypse.

Well, not the Apocalypse exactly – but close to it. In Jordan Summers' 2008 “Dead World” novels Red and Scarlet (and the later sequel Crimson), the near future setting looks fairly grim: war is brewing between the forces of corrupt government (here embodied in the slimy, ruthless politician Roark Montgomery – think Malcolm McDowell in his hammiest late period and you'll have it perfectly) and the hidden society of the Others, humans with seemingly supernatural abilities derived from long-forgotten scientific experiments (like the ones that gave rise to male models in our own world? Summers is wisely silent on the issue...).

In the first book, Gina “Red” Santiago is a member of an elite tactical squad – she's a dab hand at unarmed combat and a crack shot with her laser pistol – sent to a small town to root out possible Others-related trouble. There she encounters Sheriff Morgan Hunter, but one glance at the cover of Red will alert readers that she only maybe also encounters Paul. In that first book, a terrific little adveture story told in Summers' winningly hard-boiled way, not only does “Red” learn something amazing about herself, she also falls in love with hunky Sheriff Hunter, who's hiding a fairly big secret of his own.

Which is to say, they're both werewolves. Morgan's been doing it a long time, and eventually he starts tutoring “Red,” whose transition from 'us' to 'them' is predictably bumpy. But it's only in the series' second volume, Scarlet, that we start to view a new and exciting reality of our own: it's only in Scarlet that we begin at last the journey to Planet Paul.

The first step in that journey is right on the cover. Instead of neatly-pressed linen or (gawd help us) turtleneck sweaters, we see a dirty tank-top stretched taut over Paul's chest, we see his gorgeous face looking straight at us and tilted slightly down for maximum brooding impact, and most importantly, we see the glint of near-future semi-apocalyptic light glinting off the bare, sweaty flesh of his throat and shoulder. This is no memo-dictating business tycoon.

The actual text of Scarlet follows suit. In the narrative, “Red”s former employers – and the insidious Roark – are after both her and Paul, and it seems like they've enlisted the entire world to help out. Our heroes are almost alone (there are two heroic supporting characters, but, hilariously, they spent most of the book humping like bunnies rather than helping out) against impossible odds. But that doesn't stop Summers from doing what so many of our previous writers have hesitated to do: releasing her inner Paul-lust. On the surface, passages like this one might be intended to represent “Red”s point of view – but it's pretty obviously the author herself – and by extension the rest of us – who's getting swept away:

The wind picked up. Morgan had his dark head thrown back, letting the desert breeze caress his skin. Wildness surrounded him, oozing out of his pores like the sweet musk that covered his body. The man was magnificent in his rugged beauty. His wolf brushed his flesh in a primitive caress. Despite his civilized reserve, it always lurked just beneath the surface, a barely leashed sexual being that was impossible to ignore. Even now he drew her to him without trying, the aura of dominant power second nature.

But as gratifying as it is for it to finally make its appearance, naked Paul-lust isn't the only crucial element that's been missing so far. The full glory of Velvet Haven has many components – one of them is Paul in full 'rugged beauty' display (in reality, one couldn't really call Paul's fine, miniature features rugged – but in fiction, the translation works), yes, but another is taking that beauty and beating the stuffing out of it. We must not just have Paul's masculinity unbound – we must have it then promptly bound up again.

So it is in Scarlet, where the forces of the evil Roark capture Paul, rough him up, and chain him to a wall for weeks. This is certainly a good start. When “Red” is captured and thrown in his cell with him, she's appalled by the shape he's in and, werewolf to werewolf, asks the natural question:

“Why didn't you shift? You could at least have healed your wounds so you could escape.”

“He [Roark] has the place under electronic surveillance. He vowed to broadcast the vid-clip if I shifted. It would play right into his plans to expose the Others. I couldn't do that. The whole world is worth more than a single individual.”

Red swallowed hard as the full import of their situation hit her. “Not to me,” she whispered.

(That “Not to me” is quintessential Summers – there are neat little lines like that one scattered throughout all three of these books)

Summers has often commented that the genesis of the “Dead World” novels was a simple question: what if Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf were the same person? She meant the question to get at the heart of the 'tough girl' sub-genre of urban fantasy that's now dominated by the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris, but it serves equally well to bring us closer to the heart of Planet Paul. Little Red Riding Hood is small, shapely, visually arresting, and readily victimized; the Big Bad Wolf is brawny, brooding, strangely magnetic, and easily drafted as an anti-hero. The two halves of Paul, in other words – but what if they were the same person? Novels that have seized on only one half or the other have failed to achieve maximum Paulification.

Scarlet and Crimson share the distinction of being among the first books to show us the path to that goal, but they won't be the last! Now that we've had a taste of that potential, how can we be satisfied with less?

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Playboy Boss, Live-In Mistress!

A glance – a lingering, smoldering glance – at the cover of Kelly Hunter's 2008 “Harlequin Presents” romance Playboy Boss, Live-In Mistress will be enough to tip off expert Paul-watchers that our broodingly sexy hero is still learning the ropes in this volume (not literally, the tease, but we can always hope): he's still fully clothed.

True, it's snug clothing in sleek whites and grays, suitable for highlighting his muscular little body. And true, the young business woman (equally sleekly outfitted) on the cover is doing what any sensible person would do in such a situation: she's holding Paul's discreetly feathered mullet firmly with one hand while she starts to unbutton him with the other. By contrast, he seems almost shy: his left hand (the one with the expensive watch) is merely touching her thigh, and his right hand (where all the action is, as it were) is MIA. In terms of a Paul Marron cover, it's virtually chaste. Yes, we're still in apprenticeship days here.

Some other things haven't changed either: Paul – this time he's Alexander Wentworth, ruthless young corporate takeover expert – is still filthy rich as well as being menacingly good-looking, and he's still characterized, at least in the story's beginning, as, well, a bit materialistic:

If an eight-knot wind was blowing north-north-east off the Cornwall coast, and he had no place to be but on his yacht and nothing to do but set a course and peel a diamond-encrusted bikini off a beautiful woman, Lex could be very patient indeed. Journeys of seduction were meant to be savoured and savour them he did. Frequently.

The object of his desire in this book is his personal assistant Sienna Raleigh, who's no slouch in the looks department herself and has known Paul his entire life. She's only filling in for the PA job, really: Paul lost his last one (something about motherhood), and since nobody knows him better than Sienna, she's keeping his life in order until a proper search can be conducted. She's also the voice of the conscience she knows he has, reminding him that instead of stepping in at the last minute to gut failing companies, he could try to save them instead.

But the shift in their relationship – from long-time friends and virtual siblings to boss and biddable underling – acts tectonically, allowing pent-up magma to boil to the surface. Suddenly all that comfort and security between them turns to white-hot desire. Suddenly for Sienna, anyway – in this book as in all books, white-hot desire seems to be Paul's default setting. He must have the metabolism of a bunny rabbit.

Soon, the passionate love-making starts, and some of it – well, let's just say Paul's technique sometimes seems to have wandered in from another kind of romance altogether:

Lex shot out from beneath her, cursing, half laughing, as he rolled her over and pinned her face down against the bed, one hand on the small of her back as he half straddled her to stop her from turning over and reaching for him again. Better, much better, as he slid her silky hair to one side and nipped the back of her neck. Sienna moaned and tried to turn around but he wasn't having that. There was the small matter of control. Lex had it. He was keeping it.

What ensues is a battle of wills on many levels: will Sienna surrender to passions she didn't even know she felt? Will Paul allow her to awaken the good-guy buried deep in his corporate shark heart (some ill-timed mentions of the “sub-prime housing market” might make some readers want to rip that heart right out of his pillowy chest and put it in a blender)?

Readers will keep turning pages to find out – Kelly Hunter is a bit of a sleek professional herself: there's not an ounce of fat anywhere in this novel. She wrote it in 2008 (originally for the apparently burgeoning Australian romance market? Who would have guessed Australian men, of all people, were leaving their women-folk with enough extra energy to read romantic fantasies? What international stereotype will be the next to fall? An Irishman saying, “well, you know me – one drink's my limit!”? A Frenchman saying, “Without my warm, soapy morning's shower, I just don't feel clean!”?), and when it was brought out by Harlequin in 2009 it was festooned with provocative banners - “Kept For His Pleassure” and “She's his mistress on demand!” - which is a bit of a shame, since whoever tacked on those labels didn't read the book. We're not talking Proust here, granted, but still: Sienna is hardly kept for Paul's pleasure or his mistress on demand – there's more, yes, subtlety here than that.

More subtlety, but decidedly not more of Paul's bare torso! Back in 2008 he was still a shy, journeyman cover-model wearing button-down shirts and pants and everything. But will he always remain so? Tune in next time and find out!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Wolf Moon!

We're still covering Paul's early adventures, including this one: Wolf Moon, part of the “Harlequin Intrigue” line from 2007, part of the “McKenna Legacy” sub-series, written by Patricia Moore but copyrighted, sotto voce, to Patricia Pinianski.

Paul looks a trifle worried on the cover, and there are two possible reasons for that: first, he's got all those clothes on, and second, he's the scion of the reclusive, mysterious Lindgren clan in remote Wolf Creek up in snowbound Wisconsin, where locals have been turning up dead, apparently savaged by a large dog-like creature. The Lindgrens are natural objects of suspicion (it's just Paul and his creepy-intense father in that opulent cabin with its gazillion books and panoramic views), and as if that weren't bad enough, into the mix comes one of the aforementioned McKennas – and this one's a gorgeous woman!

Aileen McKenna has come to study wolves in the wild, and she runs afoul of Paul as quick as you can say 'handsome, enigmatic stranger.' Paul is trying to be nice, lord knows, but even this early in our investigations we've come to see that he's easily misunderstood – he's always pouting and smoldering, after all, when in so many situations a smile and a firm handshake would work wonders instead.

The problem is, Paul's just as protective of the wolf-pack that lives in the area as Aileen is, but at first he thinks she has ulterior motives, and she thinks he's hiding something. She doesn't have ulterior motives – she's up there solely to study the wolves, certain that they're innocent of any citizen-maulings. But he does indeed have something to hide – this is a romance novel, after all! - not that you'll need to qualify for MENSA to guess what that something is. Let's just say he'll provide Aileen with the perfect opportunity to mix business with pleasure.

But first they have to get to know each other! This involves many hikes into the deep dark woods, and it offers Paul plenty of opportunities to display handy shop-class skills one suspects many of his fellow male models sorely lack, such as the fashioning of a walking staff:

Rhys [that's Paul!] quickly stripped the branch of any offshoots. Fascinated, Aileen watched him work.

His hands were sure, as if he'd done this hundreds of times. She could imagine those hands working on her, stripping off her clothes, smoothing her skin …

Rhys glanced up and heat seared her cheeks.

“You certainly took to the outdoors,” she said, trying to cover. “Your father was a good teacher.”

“That he was. He taught me everything I know. He didn't just teach me to be self-sufficient. Actually, he used to be a college professor. Psychobiology,” he added, “studying the interactions between biology and behavior. Father made sure I was properly educated.”

“You didn't go off to school?”

“Didn't need to. Everything I needed to learn is in our library. Literature. History. Sciences. Everything. My knowledge is equivalent to an advanced degree.”

He's so earnest in his social maladjustment that we almost don't want to break the news to him about 'psychobiology' … and as you can see, the sparks are already flying between these two! Paul's adventures might have only just begun, but he's already well adept at super-heating nearby women like some kind of roving microwave oven.

Wolf Moon picks up pace and tension almost from the first page, and unlike the vast majority of romance novels out there, it has a long and raucous action-sequence as its climax (not that kind of action, and not that kind of climax, you filthy little things!). Paul might not really have the equivalent of an “advanced degree” from all those hours spent loitering in his father's library, but when the chips are down and the book's delightfully over-the-top villain makes his big appearance, our hero steps up with distinctly less cerebral talents.

But even so – all those clothes! Paul must have wondered if he'd ever get a chance to breathe free! Will things be any better next time? Tune in and find out!

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Velvet Haven!

This is Paul Marron, a funny, articulate, down-to-earth guy with a pointy nose, a nasal voice, a limited but effective cooking repertoire, and a fine ear for music:



As you can see, he’s a good-looking young guy, but it’s only when you widen the frame and get him to take his shirt off (the latter being, it must be admitted, not particularly difficult) that an important extra point begins to dawn on you: Paul is rather gorgeous, in a well-sculpted, compact kind of way.



Paul himself must have realized this fairly early on, and it gives rise to a bit of irony: that this somewhat private, old-fashioned, and oddly shy guy (his sporadic attempts at blogging virtually scream ‘I really don’t much want to do this’) would make a very good living taking his clothes off and posing for pictures of his chiseled cheek-bones, his shapely shoulders, and most of all, his astounding abs. Readers of romance fiction can recognize those abs as quickly (and as fondly) as they recognize their own children, because Paul has appeared on innumerable paperback covers over the last few years.

Although the real-life details of his day-to-day are probably endearingly prosaic, Paul leads a vigorous double life as the characters in all these books, so it seems only natural (aesthetically and, um, otherwise) to peek in from time to time on those alternate adventures, just to see how busy the other Paul is keeping himself.

We could start anywhere, really (and not necessarily in romance – he’s popular on sci-fi covers too, as we shall see). At any given time in every bookstore in the United States, there are at least a dozen covers featuring Paul in one pose and costume or another. 2010 will see at least 50 such covers, and 2009 was the same way, with this one set of cheekbones magically morphing onto cover after cover.



So let’s start with Paul the magical being – in this case, code-named Bran, a prince of the otherworldly Sidhe (those of you who’re familiar with Celtic mythology need not get your hopes up, though) in Velvet Haven, the first book of Sophie Renwick’s “Immortals of Annwyn” series, issued as a trade paperback this year by Heat, a not-particularly-scholarly imprint of Penguin. Bran is described several times in the book as a handsome devil, and there’s Paul on the cover, flexing in leather pants and a leather vest-cape that looks like something his employers at Undergear would sell with a straight (well ….) face, plus a gigantic tattoo of a type Paul himself is perhaps a bit too squeamish (or is it sensible?) to inflict on his own body.

Paul is a bit of a jerk in this book, but perhaps with cause. It turns out he’s been cursed by Cailleach, his cool drink of water co-ruler back in the mystical realm of Annwyn, and the curse is just the type romance writers love to think up: he will never find true love, but his mystical powers will be energized by lots and lots of raw, passionate sex. David Copperfield never got that in his contract, but I bet he wishes he had.

So Paul is bitter – at Cailleach, at the evil twist of fate that has imprisoned his brother in stone for centuries, and at mortals in general, whom he despises even though they provide him with his magical Viagra. And when the ritually-murdered bodies of fellow Sidhe keep turning up in the mortal world Bran now calls home, he naturally suspects Cailleach of some further treachery – or perhaps the treachery starts with Suriel, the fallen angel who prowls the perimeter of the novel and steals every scene he’s in. Suriel is clearly playing his own game, and he can be refreshingly diabolical, as in the scene where he saves the badly-wounded Bran and then makes an inventively scientific threat when Bran refuses to do as he says:

“I wouldn’t make a deal with you if my last breath depended on it.”

Suriel laughed and stepped on his arm harder, making him scream inside. “So much pride,” he said. He clicked his tongue as if he were chiding a child. “It’ll be your downfall, you know. You’re not in Annwyn, King. You’re among mortals. And you know what mortals love? They love knowledge, science. They hunger for it. And wouldn’t you make a nice little science project for the doctors at the hospital.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Imagine what they would say once they started examining you, system by system.”

In the distance, Bran could see the big blue square with the large white H. “You blackmailing son of a bitch!”

OK, so Paul isn’t at his most articulate in Velvet Haven (nor his most poetic – at one point, in mid-coitus, he informs his bedmate “you fuck like a nymph”; even when the reference can be checked, it’s not the sort of thing a girl likes to hear right at that moment), but there’s a very good sense of word-rhythm on display in that center paragraph and many other such paragraphs in this smutty, smutty book. Renwick might not be able to show this novel to her mother (and if she can, I’d like to meet the woman), but she can hold her head up in the company of her romance author peers.

The key to the mystery in this book seems to be the mortal woman Mairi MacAuley, a knockout nurse with psychic powers (it’s all a bit much to take in, and it’s to Renwick’s credit that she never slows down and explains it all for more than a sentence or quick paragraph here and there – the story takes off running, and we get filled in on the bare minimum of exposition we need to keep up; science fiction and fantasy authors routinely pooh-pooh the romance genre, but Renwick unfolds her created world with a skill and control that most of those sci-fi authors couldn’t muster for all the gold-pressed latinum in the quadrant) who falls in love with Bran and may hold the key to lifting his curse.

Or at least providing him with lots and lots of acrobatic sex. Velvet Haven isn’t exactly a raunchy piece of straight-up porn – there’s too much plot for that, and the book’s two most interesting characters, Cailleach and Suriel, don’t even come within bodice-ripping distance of each other – but hoo boy, Paul gets several extended (so to speak) erotic workouts in the course of the book, including one climactic (so to speak) episode during which he’s tightly manacled.

And naturally in the course of the book (which very much has a first-chapter feel to it, intimating more “Immortals of Annwyn” books to come) Paul learns to un-harden (er, that is, soften) his heart and care for this mortal woman, despite his previous strictly dietary relationship with he species.

The archangel Gabriel puts in an appearance (he gets the worst of a verbal exchange with Suriel, as does everybody else), and the full extent of Cailleach’s villainy is gradually revealed. Paul doesn’t exactly end up happy at the end of the book, but that’s to be expected: although in real life he has an extremely infectious smile, happy endings don’t really match up well with the force-10 pout he’s got going on this book’s cover.

Will Paul find true happiness in his next adventure? I’ll keep you posted.

This Duchess of Mine!

Our book today is This Duchess of Mine, a 2009 entry in Eloisa James' ongoing series of Romance novels featuring Georgian duchesses with various kinds of marital dilemmas. Which, as a one-sentence overview, doesn't distinguish these books much from hundreds of other Romance novels published every year - it often seems like the half that don't feature the sultry undead feature the idle landed gentry.

The important difference - in these as in all books, in all genres, at all times - is the tenor of the prose. Clever plotting helps, and a sturdy premise is quite useful (and neither of those things is ever as common as I'd like), but the basic math of fiction still applies: the more energy and wit the author pours into their work, the more enjoyment you'll get out of it.

In this respect, the genre of Romance virtually belongs to Eloisa James. It's a given in this series of hers that her love-plagued duchesses are always smarter and quicker-witted than everybody around them (including, with satisfying regularity, their husbands), but the same could be said of James herself - her prose sparkles with lively dialogue, tastefully understated descriptions (over-elaborate descriptions being the bane of period Romances), an easy assurance (including - and extreme rarity here - action sequences, which James handles with exciting ease), and a continuing awareness of 'the Big Picture,' a broader perspective than you usually find in genre novels.


The problem faced by Jemma, the beautiful and slightly imperious Duchess of Beaumont in This Duchess of Mine, is mischievously simple: she's in love with her husband. Which sounds simple enough in 2009 (or, considering the divorce rates in America, maybe it doesn't), but in 1784 London's smart set, it's positively gauche. Neither the Duke nor the Duchess has a spotless romantic history (he has a mistress, she dabbles in naughty affairs)(although never, she somewhat limply asserts, with a married man), and when the book opens he's hardly thinking of passionate affairs with his wife - he's far too absorbed in helping William Pitt run England. His wife isn't the only character to refer to Elijah, the Duke, as 'puritanical,' but she's determined to add some actual passion to their arranged marriage. It's a serious mission and she's serious about it, despite being surrounded by fawning fops who advise against seriousness of any kind:

"Are we allowed to be serious only about stockings?" she asked.

He thought about it longer than she thought necessary. "I am quite serious about scandal," he offered.

"But never about passion itself?"

He wrinkled his nose but his eyes were sympathetic. "Thank God, infatuation has never forced me into seriousness. A beautiful woman should never be serious, Duchess."

"Why not?"

"It implies that there is something you cannot have. And we who are not as beautiful prefer to believe that you have everything you wish for in life. That is the essence of beauty, after all."

One of the little hallmarks of a good Romance novel is audience participation - if the author knows her business, she'll have her readers so frustrated with her main characters that they won't know whether to cheer for them or strangle them. This is certainly the case with Elijah and Jemma, both extremely intelligent, willful chess players, and - it turns out - both wanting the same thing: the complete devotion of the other. As each proceeds through a series of harmless flirtations and stumbled-into misunderstandings, they alternately infuriate and exasperate each other, as in a tense scene where the Duchess shows the Duke an expensive new chess set:

"Where did you acquire this?" he inquired.

"Oh, it was a gift," Jemma said. "Look, Elijah, the rook has a tiny person inside the window."

"Would you say that I am a restrained person?"

Jemma looked up. Her husband sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth. "Yes, of course I would, Elijah."

"In short, my face never takes on a seething expression like that on the face of this king."

She was starting to wish she had just gone to bed.

"This is a gift from a man, isn't it?" Elijah said, still with that curiously flat intonation.

"If you are planning to boil with rage over that fact," she said. "I believe we should cancel our game until tomorrow."

"This chess set is worth a small fortune."

Jemma put down the piece she was holding and rose to her feet.

"I know exactly who sent it to you. And I won't have it."

This Duchess of Mine is pure, vivacious fun, with two central characters who are compulsively interesting. James' writing rewards readers with a smile or a surprise on every page. This last week saw the publication of her next Duchess book, A Duke of Her Own - I haven't read it yet, but I'm betting I'll like it.

The Viscount in Her Bedroom

Our book today is Gayle Callen's 2007 romance novel The Viscount in Her Bedroom, the third volume in her saga of the marital adventures of the high-spirited Shelby girls, Louisa, Meriel, and Victoria, as they seek to mend their family's fortunes - and find true love - in 1840's London and surrounding country houses.

When our story opens, kind, empathizing Louisa is growing bored and frustrated when she receives a message from the Dowager Viscountess Wade, offering her employment as companion to her grandson, Simon (the Viscount of the title), a dashing, sociable young man who's been blinded in a riding accident and retired from society. Louisa remembers young Viscount Wade vividly, and her generous heart is immediately struck by all the changes his affliction must have wrought in his life.

With quick, deft strokes, Callen thus sets her stage for the inevitable romance that will blossom between Viscount Wade (Callen calls him 'Lord' interchangeably, which is incorrect and therefore odd, since her entire series - The Duke in Disguise, The Lord Next Door, and this volume - is based on titles, which you'd think she'd have sorted out before she embarked on the task) and Louisa. Callen has a sure sense of the shifting vulnerabilities between the two ... shifts made all the more precarious by the burgeoning desire that tips even innocuous encounters into greater significance, as when Louisa offers a such a simple thing as guiding Simon by the arm:

She paused. "May I escort you?"

"I enjoy being displayed on the arm of a beautiful woman."

He felt her arm tighten in his, but all she did was laugh, that husky laugh that made him yearn to hear it in private.

She was patient and cautious as they walked, speaking softly of every obstacle in the way. He was the one who couldn't concentrate, with her soft breast pressed into his upper arm. He stumbled once when they reached the terrace, and she hugged his arm even tighter. He could have groaned.

Naturally, there are complications that crop up in the course of their true love, but they are swept away as the novel hums along. Callen's prose sparkles with her evident delight in the act of writing itself, and that makes her a wonderful companion. The romance genre, despite being far and away the best-selling school of fiction currently being published, is habitually looked upon with disdain by readers of more 'serious' types of fiction. But we here at Stevereads aren't 100 percent sure Jane Austen, were she alive today, would share that disdain.

In any case, we doubt she'd wring her hands worrying about the distinction, and Gayle Callen certainly doesn't; she has dancing, delightful stories to tell, and The Viscount in Her Bedroom is a very enjoyable example, worth your attention for an idle hour.