Truth be told, Miss Bates LOVES a romance narrative where the cool, collected, rational heroine is contrasted with an impassioned, irrational, impulsive hero. Miss Bates is totally drawn to a romance convention Hoyt exploited. Though there are sundry reasons Miss Bates should’ve raised her nose to Sweetest Scoundrel, instead she stayed up late reading as it held her in thrall. Harte”, Asa, when she confronts him about his cavalier spending of her brother’s money and then goes about controlling Asa’s purse-strings. Officious, book-keeping, and dignified Eve meets volatile, foul-mouthed, and crude “Mr. Responsible for Val’s interests in his absence (his shenanigans sent him into “exile” on the continent), she ensures his investment in Asa Makepeace’s grand rebuilding project, the pleasure garden known as Harte’s Folly, is solid. Eve is the only person who genuinely loves her nefarious brother. As the old duke’s illegitimate daughter, Eve lives an introvert’s ideal life: Val provides her with a lovely home and servants, ample income to indulge her miniature painting hobby, keep her caged dove in fancy seeds, and a bodyguard, a great character in and of himself, Jean-Marie Pépin. And what a scoundrel Asa Makepeace was, paired with a plain-Jane heroine, his “harpy,” as he called her, Eve Dinwoody, sister to Valentine Napier, Duke of Montgomery (the previous novel‘s villain).

found herself reading Hoyt’s, yes, ninth Georgian-set, Maiden-Lane novel, Sweetest Scoundrel. Elizabeth Hoyt: Miss Bates just can’t quit you.

Sweetest scoundrel by elizabeth hoyt