Kleypas creates a vivid context for her lovers. Their Happily Ever After seems inevitable not because of the demands of the genre but because they belong with one another. The two cherish everything–body, heart,and mind–about each other. Their love scenes are aren’t just erotic, they’re intimate. Each word and touch they exchange is making love, creating an abiding and encompassing relationship. Helen and Rhys are smashing together–there isn’t a scene they share that doesn’t serve their love story. As he tells her in one of the book’s many romantic passages, when he is with her, he is, for the first time, complete. He values his fortune with the fervor of one raised terribly poor and, other than Helen, he’s never needed anyone. He’s from a working class Welsh family, a self-made man and a fearsome competitor, someone who breaks more rules than he follows. He would expect her to make his wishes her own. A member of the landed gentry, bland and reserved, with a very tall forehead. Meet an eligible man her family would approve of. In that, it’s appealingly different from the life she thought she’d have, one in which she’d Helen realizes being Rhys’s wife will challenge her in ways she can’t fathom–he runs an department store empire and his background is wildly different than hers–but that unknown future is exciting and full of possibilities. She had never imagined that a man would kiss her as if he were trying to breathe her in, as if kisses were words meant for poems, or honey to be gathered with his tongue. She knows little of men but when Rhys kisses her, she knows that, that, is what she wants. In that book, it seemed his passion was too overwhelming for Helen.

Despite a sharing a desperate attraction for one another, their relationship is challenged by internal and external obstacles. Sounds conventional, right? It’s not.įor starters, Helen and Rhys decide to have Rhys compromise Helen so that their marriage will be a fait accompli and they both thoroughly enjoy Helen’s ruination. Rhys has burned for Helen since she nursed him back from a train accident in A Cold Hearted Rake. Helen and Rhys, she an aristocrat and he a self-made magnate, are compromised–deliciously–and agree, again, to wed. The plot is, on the surface, a familiar one. Kleypas’s earlier works–my favorite is It Happened One Autumn–and, in it, her writing is as good as it’s ever been. Marrying Winterborne is as engrossing a story as any of Ms. As almost anyone who read the first book, A Cold Hearted Rake, will tell you, Rhys and his passion for Helen utterly upstaged that story’s lovers and left historical romance readers longing for more.Īnd more, wonderfully more, readers do indeed get. Marrying Winterborne the second book in Lisa Kleypas’s dearly anticipated Ravenels series, begins with Lady Helen Ravenel calling on Rhys Winterborne, a man to whom she was briefly engaged.

Lisa kleypas winterborne