Laura Lee Guhrke
Trouble at the Wedding
Avon, December 27, 2011, $ 7.99/$4.99 digital
Annabel is about to marry the perfect man . . .
The last thing Miss Annabel Wheaton desires is true love. She learned the hard way that love makes a woman foolish and leads only to heartache. That’s why she agreed to marry an earl who needs her money. He’s got a pedigree and a country estate, and he won’t ever break her heart. There’s only one problem . . .
Christian isn’t about to let her marry that pompous prig . . .
Christian Du Quesne, Duke of Scarborough, thinks the stubborn heiress is about to make the biggest mistake of her life, and he’s determined to stop her. Tempting beautiful women is Christian’s forte, after all. When her family offers him a nice sum of money to stop the wedding, he’s happy to accept.
Falling in love with Annabel was never supposed to be part of the bargain . . .
The blurb actually does a very good job of laying out the plot of Laura Lee Guhrke’s Trouble at the Wedding—how refreshing! What it doesn’t do is even hint at Annabel’s origins. She is poor, white trash from Gooseneck Bend, Mississippi, who was deemed good enough to be deflowered by Billy John the banker’s son, but not good enough to marry. After her father struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush, leaving untold wealth to his only child, Annabel’s family moved to the Big City of Jackson and threw a come-out ball for her. But no one came.
While Annabel is smart and funny and a pragmatist, beneath it all she is desperate to belong and to be accepted. Moving to New York City and living amongst the Knickerbocker crowd hasn’t done it, but she is hoping that marriage to a British title will. Guhrke does a wonderful job of showing Annabel’s vulnerability without making her pitiful or whiny, as she tells Christian, the impoverished duke who’s been hired by Annabel’s uncle to derail the wedding:
“You were born accepted, so you don’t know what it’s like not to be. You walk through life always confident of your acceptance in any situation. You don’t know how it feels to be shunned. To be laughed at for the way you talk or the place you were born. To be looked down on, to have your whole family looked down on, as if you were dirt on the floor. Nobody,” she added, lifting her chin with dignity, “looks down on a countess … That’s why I’m here. I want to know all the rules, because I don’t ever want to stand in an empty ballroom in London the way I did in Jackson. I don’t ever want to feel again what I felt that night.”
But Christian knows that London society can—and will—look down on her, as they have all the other wealthy American girls, the infamous Buccaneers, who have invaded England looking for titles. He sees her intrinsic worth and finds her to be a breath of fresh air after the stultifying drawing rooms of the ton. Soon she is not just a way to earn some badly needed money, but a friend whom he must save from heartache and disillusion.
“You can’t marry him because he doesn’t love you. Because he’s a fortune hunter, and he’s an ass. Because he orders your food for you without consulting you, without even considering that you might want something different. Because he’ll wear you down, him and his sisters and his mother, and all their relations, molding you and shaping you and changing you when there isn’t a damned thing wrong with you and you don’t need to be changed. Because he doesn’t respect you, because he acts as if you’re lucky to have him when he ought to be down on his knees thanking God he’s lucky enough to have you. And because…damn it all…because there are things you’ll never know with him, things he’ll never be able to make you feel.”
Well. Okay then. And this is only the beginning. Annabel and Christian are great characters, and have a great story to tell about love and acceptance.
Cheryl Sneed reviews for Rakehell.com.
