H's resentment towards h and his disillusioned attitude towards love were rather puzzling, considering h was a victim of the past as much as he himself was and that her love was true.

Inconsistent characters, dialogues that were muddled and rereading them did not impart more sense to them. You can read the rest of this review at AudioGals. How about Agatha’s nephew, the newly minted Earl of Stonebridge (Jared)? He’s staying with his aunt, and is the ideal person to keep an eye on Emily! (*rolls eyes*) But they need someone there to keep an eye on her. “Our father has been dead for three years, we’re your guardians now, and you do what we say.”Īs he and his brothers are about to remove to London, the duke decrees that Emily should go to stay at the country home of Agatha Appleby, a friend of the family. “Daddy said I could choose my own husband.” Almost the entire first chapter – about twenty-five minutes long – consists of the five of them having the following conversation: Her eldest brother, Roderick, Duke of Elbourne, is dictatorial (to put it mildly) and acts as though he has a stick up his arse for most of the book.

She is headstrong, beautiful and rich, and they want to make sure she doesn’t end up in the clutches of some unscrupulous fortune hunter. The book opens as Lady Emily’s four brothers inform her that they will shortly be choosing her a husband, much to her dismay. This isn’t a spy story, however – and more’s the pity, because then it might have been more interesting. And unbeknownst to both her brother and Jared, Emily has a sooper-sekrit identity of her own, assumed when she began to work for Whitehall, too, to dull the pain caused by Jared’s abrupt defection and departure. In the year since his return from India as a widower, Jared has been working undercover for the British government, his sooper-sekrit identity known only to a select few – including Emily’s eldest brother, who has worked alongside him. Following that, Jared had quickly married another woman and taken up a post in India, breaking Emily’s heart in the process. The story revolves around the on-off romance between Lady Emily Clearbrook and Jared Ashton, Lord Stonebridge, who had fallen in love three years earlier, but were unable to marry because her father refused to grant them permission. The Rejected Suitor was originally published in 2004, and I regret to say that I don’t think it has aged well. I've given this a D for content and a B- for narration at AudioGals

The Rejected Suitor by Teresa McCarthy