Seducing an Angel (Huxtable Series), Mary Balogh

Seduc­ing an Angel by Mary Balogh (2009) is the fourth book in the Huxtable series released in hard­cover and pub­lished by Dell. The fol­low­ing review was writ­ten by fel­low reader and con­trib­u­tor, Sen­e­tra. Enjoy.

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Stephen Huxtable, the Earl of Mer­ton, first appeared as a 17-year-old young man in First Comes Mar­riage, then aged a few years in each sub­se­quent book, and now he is 25 and the hero of his own story. Over the course of the pre­vi­ous books, Stephen seemed to have it all, a lov­ing fam­ily, wealth, a title, and good looks. He was a com­plete Mary Sue; I can’t remem­ber too much unhap­pi­ness on his part once he became the earl. Before I read the book, I tried to fig­ure out what the con­flict between the hero and hero­ine would be, but couldn’t think of any­thing that didn’t involve either a com­plete rewrite of his char­ac­ter, or some dis­fig­ur­ing inci­dent that left him some com­bi­na­tion of angry, bit­ter, scarred, and crip­pled. Stephen’s still hale and hearty, and I don’t recall Mary Balogh writ­ing a sim­ple Boy meets Girl romance, so all the angst and drama comes from the heroine.

Cas­san­dra Bel­mont, Lady Paget, is a widow rumored to have killed her hus­band with an axe. The truth is that he was shot, but no one has come forth as a wit­ness to say what actu­ally hap­pened, and as long as Cas­san­dra left the estate and did not press her claim to it, her step­son was will­ing to let her go. This means that Cas­san­dra is des­ti­tute, with now way to sup­port her house­hold, con­sist­ing of her for­mer gov­erness, Alice, a maid-of-all-work, Mary, and Mary’s daugh­ter Belinda. They move to Lon­don where Cas­san­dra is deter­mined to set her­self up as a rich man’s mis­tress. She spies Stephen in the park, and is attracted to his angelic looks and she decides he will make a good pro­tec­tor. In order to intro­duce her­self to him, she crashes a ball, not real­iz­ing that the Earl and Count­ess of Sher­ing­ford are related to Stephen. Know­ing all about social ostracism, they make her wel­come, and she even­tu­ally con­vinces Stephen to come home with her. After a some­what lack­lus­ter per­for­mance in bed, Stephen falls deeply asleep, only to awake the next morn­ing and find Cas­san­dra ready to nego­ti­ate a con­tract. Once he real­izes just how poor Cas­san­dra is, and fig­ures out that her hus­band abused her, Stephen agrees to the arrange­ment, but is deter­mined to have more than a wholly sex­ual rela­tion­ship. Cas­san­dra does not wish for emo­tional inti­macy and tries to put the focus back on the sex.

Stephen man­ages to ignore Alice’s dis­taste for his rela­tion­ship with Cas­san­dra, but his con­science gets the bet­ter of him when he finds that Belinda lives in the house as well. Not want­ing to taint her home, he ends the sex part of the con­tract, but tells Cas­san­dra that he wants to get to know her bet­ter. This occurs in fits and starts, and Cas­san­dra begins to piece her life back together, finally decid­ing to fight for her part of the estate and mend­ing fences with her brother.

After read­ing this book, I’m not sure how much I like or know either of these char­ac­ters. Cas­san­dra is only three years older than Stephen is, but she some­times tries to keep him at a dis­tance treat­ing him as if he’s a teenaged boy with a crush on her. I know this is part of her defense mech­a­nism, but it got tir­ing, and at times, it felt as if Stephen’s feel­ings were more about lust than any­thing else. Yes, he fell in love with her, but I still can’t fig­ure out why.

While I wasn’t as inter­ested in this story as I was in the pre­vi­ous ones, I did want to find out how it wraps up for the sib­lings. This book had cameos by the sis­ters and their hus­bands, but it also felt very short, and after read­ing it, I decided that with some edit­ing of the plot, this novel would have fit nicely in a two-author anthol­ogy instead of being a stand-alone hard­cover release. There were some plot points and char­ac­ter inter­ac­tions that felt more like padding than actual story devel­op­ment, and one that came out of what seemed like nowhere, and I’m still not sure if I buy it.

Grade: C

Note: Appar­ently this is a quin­tet? Look for another hard­cover soon.