Heath writes about finding humanity in the people one hates and falling in love with the woman one would exploit. He recognizes vulnerabilities and nuances in the Duke, the Duchess, even the dissipated Kip. It’s about how Mick, by getting to know Aslyn and the Hedleys (as all families are more complicated than meets the eye) he begins to see more in Aslyn than a “mark”. Heath’s romance isn’t merely about how Mick is hoisted on his own petard.

As for Lady Aslyn? It’s easy to ruin a woman by seducing and then rejecting her. He gambles, losing every un-entailed property his father has given him. “Kip,” has a weakness and it isn’t Lady Aslyn. Mick’s plan? To ruin Kip and Aslyn as a way of blackmailing Hedley to acknowledge him. In the first chapter’s opening scene, Mick and “sister” Fancy stroll through Cremorne Gardens where Mick has plotted to encounter the Earl of Kipwick, son to the Duke of Hedley, and the Duke’s ward and soon-to-be-announced fiancée to Kip, Lady Aslyn Hastings. The babe is grown, a powerful, wealthy, self-made man, Mick Trewlove, who’s plotting and machinating to avenge his rejection by his aristocratic father, the man who left him to a possible death (as we learn in the novel’s course, a sad, common practice of dealing with unwanted babies). The opening chapter jumps thirty-plus years forward.

To start, the novel’s gothic opening sees a London aristocrat deliver a new-born to the East End Widow Trewlove, by-blow of an affair? shame of the aristocracy? Yet, the birth scene had been one of tenderness and love between mother and father … whatever happened here, I wanted to know.

What kept me rivetted was Heath’s weaving of a tale about the need to be recognized, acknowledged, loved, and validated, a journey both hero and heroine take in their unique ways, about what family means, and where we can meet on a plane of forgiveness and reconciliation. The similarities to Kleypas saw me through the premise’s set-up. Beyond Scandal and Desire‘s cross-class promise, its ingenue heroine who’s too smart to stay that way and guttersnipe-made-good hero kept me reading through a slow, though evident of a sure writing hand, first third. Ostensibly, Lorraine Heath’s Beyond Scandal and Desire has echoes of Kleypas’s romance classic, but in many other ways, it is an entirely different beast, unique to Heath’s vision. I adored Sarah and Derek, the casino setting, the pesky, bespectacled heroine and hardened with a secret heart of gold hero. One of the first romance novels I read when I returned to the genre and combed through best-of lists for titles to throw money at was Lisa Kleypas’s Dreaming Of You.

Beyond scandal and desire