Thank you to the author for an advanced reader's copy!

Colleen Kelly's writing is just stunning, and I can hardly believe newsletter subscribers get another of her novellas for free. This novella is a prequel to her first (The Earl I Want for Christmas) and gives us Lydia's older brother's love story (and sweet glimpses into her friendship with her sister-in-law as a teenager!). These could easily be read in either order.

Most impressive to me in this particular story is how well-developed each character feels in a tight page count. Kelly uses a one-night-stand premise to give us glimpses into each character that she later inverts through deeper character study. Our duke shows immediate emotional vulnerability with the lovelorn actress he meets at an inn (vulnerability that feels shocking to the reader in retrospect), and our lovelorn actress evinces emotional detachment and confident seduction with the mysterious duke that reveals itself to be a painstaking facade. I loved seeing how each character is unwound after their first whirlwind encounter and how Kelly needs to then bring them back together in a meaningful way. There are several beats in this I LOVED (hasty declarations, possessiveness, ruination subverted, and more), and even with a premise that can be a miss for me (one-night-stands don't always deliver the emotional build-up I enjoy!), this felt just right in its journey to the HEA.

And I'm not kidding about Kelly's prose:
"A stunned pause while his mind turned over her words before he felt - with sudden surprise, like an animal sprung from a fatal trap - Joy. An eruption of it sweeping through him. Bright light dazzling his senses, casting the entire world in a hazy golden aura. She would be his in truth, bound forever, unshakably, unbreakably, and she would - She would not like that."

"He didn't know how to respond: gratefully or blithely or matter-of-factly. He couldn't tell which she would prefer, and he wanted to be what she preferred. So he said nothing."

"Elizabeth Langham deserved devotion and adoration and action and zeal, and though he might only have wits enough for the first two, he was going to do his damnedest to give her the entire catalogue."

"His voice was rough as stone sheared from a cliffside, hard and miserable, and she wanted to smooth it like water over glass."

"She felt - not herself. Or more herself than the limits of her body could contain. She threatened to overflow her boundaries, leak as messily onto the floor as the water that had pooled at his feet."

"As always, Rex looked for his wife, for the gold of her hair shimmering in the crowd. As always, something shifted inside him when he saw her, the essential core of loneliness that had accompanied him throughout his life slackening, turned beautiful as a basketful of silken thread waiting to be embroidered by her delicate hand."