Sweet romance which upends several genre cliches, though it's hampered by others. The heroine is angsty, the hero is nice, and there's a teeny bit of mutual bondage, and so it's exactly what I requested. Thanks guys!

Set in a probably completely historically inaccurate Regency period, but darker than most Regency romances. Serena was sold off by her brothers to an evil old pervert when she was fifteen; now he's dead, and her brothers are planning to sell her again. She flees into the night, and meets up the virgin hero, Francis, who is engaged to a nice young woman whom he doesn't love. Serena thinks her entire worth is sexual, and she molests (seduces, she thinks) him while he's asleep, figuring that all men want sex all the time, under any circumstance. She's astonished when Francis wakes up and is not happy at all.

Amazingly, what develops from this gender-reversed "You raped me, I love you" scenario is psychologically plausible and sympathetic to both parties. It's basically a marriage of convenience/necessity story, in which two people who barely know each other try to build a real relationship. Serena is traumatized and Francis is confused, and the depiction of their bewildered attempts to understand each other is very well done. There's a dumb misunderstanding subplot, which I hate, but it gratifyingly concludes with everyone realizing that they ought to have just asked each other what was going on.

I liked this. Has anyone read anything else by Beverly?

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