Scents and scentsability!

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Not Just Any Earl (Games Earl’s Play #1) by Anna Bradley  


⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️



A Cinderella remix / mashup with the glass slipper being replaced by a ribbon redundant with a subtle yet heady scent of roses.

Emmaline Templeton is one of five daughters whose scandalous mother Alice ran off to the continent with her Marquis lover years before. (Members of the Ton find that hard to forgive!) Their father died a year later. The young women are trying to make ends meet. Emmaline is trying to work out the elements constituting her father’s most perfect perfume. He never wrote the components down. The search is her passion.

Lady Fosberry (fairy godmother figure) descends on the family to whisk Lady Juliet away to spend the season with her. Emmaline will join them but stay in the background. Her desire is to search out the missing ingredient for her botanist father’s rose perfume. 

What Emmaline didn’t expect, during a ball at Lady Fosberry’s house, when she crept downstairs into the darkened library, was to to be thoroughly kissed by Lord Melrose (aka the Nonesuch)

This wouldn’t do. In her head she’d seen Lord Melrose as a potential partner for her sister Juliet.

The ton is expecting Lord Melrose to become engaged to Lady Christine Dingley, a vacuous and, as it later proves, vicious and spoilt young woman. (Ugly sister equivalent!) But after the ball, with no announcement, the ton is awash with speculation and gossip. Society’s top group is portrayed as a rapid monstrosity baying for blood. Hounds of the Baskervilles are tame compared to the ton’s dismembering of its own!

I must admit Emmaline does my head in with her excuses, pondering and double takes about how the man she loves must marry her sister Juliet. I really, really lost all patience with Emmaline during these moments.

And yes, this Regency romance has its fairytale ending. A pleasant quick read.


An Xpresso Book ARC via NetGalley 
(Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.)

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