The richest bachelor in England plays matchmaker…for an heiress he wants for himself!

For beautiful, witty Lavinia Gray, there's only one thing worse than having to ask the appalling Parth Sterling to marry her: being turned down by him.

Now the richest bachelor in England, Parth is not about to marry a woman as reckless and fashion-obsessed as Lavinia; he's chosen a far more suitable bride.

But when he learns of Lavinia's desperate circumstances, he offers to find her a husband. Even better, he'll find her a prince.

As usual, there's no problem Parth can't fix. But the more time he spends with the beguiling Lavinia, the more he finds himself wondering…

Why does the woman who's completely wrong feel so right in his arms?

My Review:

While Born to be Wilde certainly has elements of the Shakespearean farce referred to be one of the characters, there are also some interesting and surprisingly serious notes in this glorious romp of a historical romance.

At first this seems like a frenemies into lovers story. We’ve met both Lavinia Gray and Parth Sterling in the previous books in this series. Lavinia, Willa (the heroine of Wilde in Love) and Diana (heroine of Too Wilde to Wed), are best friends. Willa and Lavinia were raised together. In fact, Lavinia had set her cap for the Wilde that Willa eventually married. Lavinia’s mother tried to set Lavinia’s cap for the Wilde that Diana finally married.

Parth Sterling was raised with the Wilde brothers from the age of five. Parth is Anglo-Indian, and his parents sent him from India to be raised by his father’s friend, the Duke of Lindow. When his parents died, Parth became part of the Wilde family – and was every bit as wild a boy as any of his adopted brothers.

But Parth has a serious side. He’s become the richest bachelor in England by profitably owning and operating several factories and even his own bank. He’s a man who works hard and gets things done.

He seems to see Lavinia as merely a fribble. A lighthearted and light-minded woman who fritters away her time and her fortune on gowns, bonnets and gloves. That upper-class women are all supposed to be fribbles doesn’t keep him from seeming to look down upon her at every turn.

And she, in turn, seems to look down upon him. In her presence he always seems to be prim and proper and gloomy and doomy. In his presence she acts almost like a halfwit.

Of course, nothing is as it seems – except that they drive each other completely crazy. It’s exactly what kind of crazy that’s hiding underneath all of their cutting remarks towards each other.

It’s only when Lavinia finds herself in desperate needs of Parth’s undeniable ability to get things done that they discover that there’s more hiding behind both of their surface personas than either of them ever imagined.

But neither of them imagines how difficult it will be to let go of years of preconceived notions about each other – or about themselves. Or how much damage all those accumulated cutting remarks have already caused.

Escape Rating B+: For a story that certainly has its serious side, it is also a tremendous amount of fun, livened up by oodles of witty banter. That the heroine is far, far deeper than the shallow puddle that the hero initially claims her to be just makes the story that much more delicious.

At the same time, the story deals with some fairly serious topics. A big part of the story, introduced very early on, is that Lavinia’s mother is addicted to laudanum, otherwise known as tincture of opium. While laudanum was dispensed quite legally in many forms until the 1860s, the effects of addiction were also known – if usually swept under the rug and secreted within the family.

Lavinia begins this story where Too Wilde to Wed ends. She has discovered that her mother has squandered not just their own money but also all of Willa’s as well. And she’s sold all of her own jewelry, Lavinia’s, and Willa’s and replaced them with copies. And stolen Diana’s jewelry as well, causing the rift between Diana and her family and forcing her into the circumstances she finds herself in at the start of Too Wilde to Wed.

Lavinia needs to marry a rich man, not just to make good on everything that her mother stole, but also because she needs a husband with enough power and influence to keep her mother out of jail and to make sure the scandal doesn’t erupt.

While marrying Parth or one of the wealthy men he introduces her to would solve her problems, Lavinia also has a tremendous amount of pride, as well as one marketable talent. She hasn’t been buying all those bonnets because she’s frivolous – well, at least not just because she’s frivolous.

She’s been studying them. Lavinia has the talent, the taste and the style to become a fashion designer, or what her world calls a modiste. Diana’s upcoming wedding provides her with the opportunity to not merely arrange but actually create Diana’s incredible trousseau – and to receive commissions from all of her suppliers for the materials that are purchased for the wedding party. And from there to build a business that can pay back what her mother stole, fund her mother’s long-term care, replace her own dowry and even live independently.

In other words, more than enough commission to make a serious dent in the financial hole her mother has left them in. And that would be just the start.

But the misunderstandammit in the story is that Lavinia doesn’t want Parth to know that she’s working to pay off that debt. So the more she accomplishes, the more he sees her as still frittering away her time playing with expensive fashion. Even as they finally admit that all of their name calling and backbiting has been hiding their true feelings for each other – they aren’t quite able to let go of the hurt on both sides it has caused.

In the end, Parth has to give really good grovel, not just in begging for forgiveness, but in demonstrating that he finally understands just what a gem and an artist Lavinia truly is, for them to win through.

Lavinia, in some ways, has the harder task. She has to let go, not just of those old hurts, but the even older ones – that still small voice inside her head that sounds remarkably like her mother, that says she’s frivolous and stupid and shallow and insipid and that no one will ever pay any attention to anything she says or does.

Accepting that the voice is wrong is the hardest lesson of all.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

To celebrate the release of BORN TO BE WILDE by Eloisa James, we’re giving away one hardcover set of THE WILDES OF LINDOW CASTLE series!

LINK: https://www.subscribepage.com/BornToBeWilde

GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS:  Open to US shipping addresses only. One winner will receive a hardcover set of The Wildes of Lindow Castle series by Eloisa James. This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Avon Romance.  Giveaway ends 8/10/2018 @ 11:59pm EST. Avon Romance will send the winning copies out to the winner directly. Limit one entry per reader and mailing address. Duplicates will be deleted.

The handsome, rakish heir to a dukedom, Lord Roland Northbridge Wilde—known to his friends as North—left England two years ago, after being jilted by Miss Diana Belgrave. He returns from war to find that he's notorious: polite society has ruled him "too wild to wed."

Diana never meant to tarnish North's reputation, or his heart, but in her rush to save a helpless child, there was no time to consider the consequences of working as a governess in Lindow Castle. Now everyone has drawn the worst conclusions about the child's father, and Diana is left with bittersweet regret.

When North makes it clear that he still wants her for his own, scandal or no, Diana has to fight to keep from losing her heart to the man whom she still has no intention of marrying.

Yet North is returning a hardened warrior—and this is one battle he's determined to win.

He wants Diana, and he'll risk everything to call her his own.

My Review:

Too Wilde to Wed is an absolutely delightful romp of historical romance, and definitely a fitting sequel to the equally fun and utterly frothy Wilde in Love. The Wildes are indeed very, very wild. And the wilder they are the better things seem to turn out for them.

So it proves with North, the oldest surviving son of the Duke of Lindow. We met North in Wilde in Love, as that story, while it features his brother Alaric’s romance with Willa Ffynche, begins at North’s betrothal party and ends with that betrothal going smash.

And did it ever need to.

Too Wilde to Wed begins two years after that stunner of an ending. North has just returned from two years commanding a regiment in the Colonies, during the events that on this side of the pond are referred to as the American Revolution.

He leaves the Colonies disgusted with his superiors and their idiocy. He knows that England is losing the Colonies and believes that they should let them go. He feels that he’s lost too many good men by following bad orders and he’s had enough.

But he discovers that leaving the field of battle does not mean that the war has left him. And when he comes home he discovers that he has a new battle to face. His erstwhile fiancee, Miss Diana Belgrave, a woman he once believed fit to become the next Duchess of Lindow, is in residence at his country home, serving as governess to his youngest sister, along with a little boy that everyone seems to believe is his.

A boy that he is certain was fathered by someone else before he ever met Diana. We’ll he’s half right.

Neither Diana nor North are who they were two years ago. Not that either of them was the person that the other thought they were, even at the time. The Diana he saw was an illusion created by her mother, and the North that asked for her hand was an illusion created by his valet in order to win her hand if not her heart.

Now that their circumstances have drastically changed, they are forced to start over, getting to know the people they actually are, and discovering that they like each other a whole lot more when they are being their true selves.

And therein lies the rub. Because North’s true self is the future Duke of Lindow. And Diana’s true self wants to be anything, even a governess, even a barmaid, rather than being a future Duchess.

No matter how much she’s like to be North’s wife.

Escape Rating B+: This was just plain fun. As in, read in one day fun.

One of the great things about this story is the way that it took two people that we had already been introduced to and showed that we really didn’t know them at all. And that no matter what either of them thought, they didn’t know each other the tiniest little bit either.

In Wilde in Love, Diana was almost a cipher. There was a person filling her gowns, but she seemed to have almost no personality. Now we know why, and we hope there’s a hotter place in hell for her mother. The Diana that North saw had almost no relationship to the person she actually was. When keeping up the pretense became too much for her, she fled. And while she was foolish in many practical ways, all of her reasons were quite sound.

North acted like he had the proverbial stick shoved very, very far up his fundament. He was an entitled, overdressed prig. He deserved Diana’s jilting. But as was true with Diana, the person he pretended to be only had a passing relationship with who he really was. Part of that was due to his own self-deception, and part of it was a result of his trying to please the woman he thought Diana was. Their original relationship, if you can call it that, was doomed to failure. It’s lucky for both of them that it failed before the grand wedding instead of after.

The real people underneath both of their carefully constructed facades are much nicer, and much, much more interesting. Also much more real. And have more in common than either of their fake personas might have guessed.

North makes a worthwhile hero for a couple of reasons. He is doing the British stiff-upper-lip thing and doing his duty the best he can. He’s the oldest surviving son, he was not originally the heir. And he doesn’t want it, but doesn’t feel as if he can just give it up. He’s coping, but he certainly isn’t happy. He also went to war, and the experience left him with almost as many scars as his older brother’s death. He certainly has PTSD. It was also fascinating to see someone on the English side of the Revolution realize that any attempt to hold the Colonies was doomed to failure and deserved to be.

Unlike the fake version in Wilde in Love, this version of North is difficult not to like.

Diana as the heroine was a mass of contradictions. On the one hand, she was proud of her ability to earn her own living, and unlike so many Regency heroines, felt much more at home as the governess than she ever did as a potential duchess. On the other hand, so few of her decisions seem to have been backed up by any practicality or sense. She does the right thing for the right reasons, but goes about the practicalities the wrong way pretty much every time, and often, as the saying goes, bites off her nose to spite her face. She’s tenderhearted when she can’t afford to be, and all too often proud when she really can’t afford to be.

At the same time, she’s right about not being a good candidate to be the next duchess. She does eventually discover that she wants to be North’s wife, but thinks too little of herself to take the bad of being duchess as the necessary evil required to be with the man she loves.

They also both have a bad cases of thinking that they are not worthy of the other, but they are also surprisingly honest about it with each other. In spite of the description in the book blurb, North does figure out that this is not a battle, and that he can’t really win in the traditional sense. He can overwhelm Diana’s objections and defenses, but that will only result in both of them being completely miserable.

They both need a way out. When it comes from the most surprising source, everyone is astonished at just how long it took them both to see it. But it makes for a lovely ending. And sets readers up for more to come in the third book in the series, Born to be Wilde.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

LINK: https://goo.gl/gceRD3

GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS:  Open to US shipping addresses only. One winner will receive a hardcover copy of WILDE IN LOVE by Eloisa James and a peacock keychain. This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Avon Romance.  Giveaway ends 6/10/2018 @ 11:59pm EST. Avon Romance will send the winning copies out to the winner directly. Limit one entry per reader and mailing address. Duplicates will be deleted.