Affectations of Candour

Name: Affectations of Candour
Author: J. Marie Croft

65 pages

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Six months after Mr Darcy quit Hertfordshire, Elizabeth Bennet has resolved to think no more of him. When her young friend Bridget Hughes is orphaned and sent to live with unfamiliar relations on the Somerset coast, Elizabeth gladly agrees to keep her company for the summer; a season of sea air, new friendships, and distance from anything that might recall the haughty master of Pemberley will do very well for her.

Then she discovers that the wealthy gentleman who has just inherited the marine villa along the next bluff is Fitzwilliam Darcy himself.

He is not the man she remembers. Quieter in her company, warmer, attentive in ways Hertfordshire never showed her, Darcy seems determined to begin again. So does Elizabeth, almost despite herself…until she learns he is all but engaged to another.

Hannah Wright has spent six months working to become Mrs Darcy, and her family’s debts have made the match a matter of necessity as much as pride. She has no intention of being supplanted by a country girl with no dowry and relations in trade. What begins as cool civility soon hardens into something more dangerous, and Elizabeth finds herself the object of jealousy, deception, and a quiet campaign to drive her from the coast.

Far from London’s drawing rooms, on cliff-top walks above the Bristol Channel, Elizabeth and Darcy must decide whether what they once misunderstood can be made right and whether a second meeting can become the beginning neither of them dared expect.

Tropes: Pride and Prejudice variation, love triangle/rival for affection, second chance romance, slow burn Regency, seaside romance, clean Regency romance, forced proximity, seaside romance

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