Lady Amelia’s Secret Lover
She told her husband she was taking a lover. She was lying. She invented one, blackmailed his twin brother into helping, and waited to see whether the man would finally fight for her.
Overview
A marriage that stopped arguing, which is worse than a marriage that fights
This is the only one of the five that starts after the wedding, and it is the sharpest thing in the series about what actually goes wrong between two people. Lady Amelia has a charming husband, a respected name, an inheritance on the way and a future as a prime minister’s wife. What she does not have is any friction at all.
So she informs Robert, calmly, over brandy, that she intends to take a lover. He asks whether she has begun interviewing applicants. She laughs and tells him she is not hiring a servant. It is one of the funniest scenes in the series and neither of them is joking.
What she does not tell him is that there is no lover and there is not going to be one. The flowers arriving anonymously at her own house were ordered by her, from a man she blackmailed into sending them. A novella of a hundred and fifteen pages, and every single person in it is running a scheme on somebody they love.
The boring bit
Receipts
Story plotline
Three ways in, and every one of them gives away who is fooling whom
The plot page runs the whole thing with page numbers. The arcs page takes the marriage apart, which is the actual subject. The tropes page is about identical twins and why the swap works here and nowhere else.
What actually happens
A bracelet, a wrong conclusion, a declaration over brandy, a blackmailed brother-in-law, a dark carriage, and a woman who has never once been fooled.
Two people who stopped arguing
He thought the quiet was peace. She knew it was the end. Neither of them said so for years, which is the whole marriage in one sentence.
The twin swap, and why it works here
Identical twins pretending to be each other is usually an insult to the reader. This one survives because the woman was never fooled for a second, and the book knows it.
Characters
Who you are dealing with
Three, which is most of the cast. It is a novella. The full list, including the two men from the club who turn up at the end, is on the character page.
Lady Amelia
Eldest daughter of an earl, and the most strategically minded person in the whole series. She announces an affair she has no intention of having, then blackmails her brother-in-law into supplying the props.
Robert
A respected solicitor heading for Parliament, naturally reserved, never demonstrative, and entirely unaware that being reliable is not the same as being present.
Harry
Robert’s identical twin, the one women historically preferred, and the only person in the book with a firm moral line. He gets blackmailed across it anyway.
The series
Numbered fifth, and it does not happen fifth
This one sits out of order, and it matters for reading it. There is a scene near the end where Oliver and Sinclair drink together at the club and both are still unmarried. Two chairs have emptied, not three. So chronologically this belongs between book two and book three, and reading it there gives you the tontine at its exact halfway point.
What a Lady Wants
Cavendish falls, which is the second empty chair. Read this novella after it, not last.
Secrets of a Proper Lady
Sinclair’s turn. He spends this novella swearing he will fight to his last dying breath, which ages beautifully.
Seduction of a Proper Gentleman
Oliver, last man standing. Here he tells Sinclair he would not wager on staying single, which is the closest this series gets to foreshadowing.
All five books and the reading order → · What a tontine actually is
The author
Who wrote it
Victoria Alexander
Five books, five deceptions, and in four of them the woman knows more than the man believes she does. At this point it is not a habit, it is a thesis.
She gives the wife the whole plan
The husband thinks he is running a campaign to win her back. He is a participant in hers. Putting the strategic mind on the married woman rather than the debutante is the smartest choice in the series.
RaeRae Reviews
The verdict
The best marriage in the series, in the fewest pages
A hundred and fifteen pages and it says more about how a marriage actually fails than the four novels around it manage between them. It is also over before the good part has room to land.
All five, ranked
The whole run read and judged, with the reading order corrected and the pattern laid out: she writes the same deception five times and gets away with it.
RaeRae Reacts
Four scenes worth the whole novella
A declaration over brandy, a blackmail conducted cheerfully, a confession made to the wrong brother, and the moment she reveals she has never been fooled. All four open into the full react.
I am not hiring a servant
He asks whether she has started interviewing applicants. She laughs at him. Then she raises her glass and tells him she is impressed that he noticed anything at all, which is the cruellest compliment in the series.
This is blackmail. I know. It’s quite invigorating.
She has held a six-year-old secret to protect two brothers from each other. She now spends it, in one sentence, and enjoys herself enormously doing it.
I don’t know how to battle this
She thinks she is talking to Harry. She is talking to Robert. And she tells him the thing she cannot say to his face: she could fight another woman, but she does not know how to fight nothing at all.
It’s definitely in your kiss
He asks how she could possibly tell two identical men apart. Her answer ends the novella, the estrangement, and any argument about whether she was ever the one being fooled.
RaeRae Rants
One thing I am not letting go
She kept the peace for six years and it cost her the marriage
She stayed silent about the kiss to spare her husband embarrassment and protect two brothers from each other. Everyone praises this. Nobody notices she was the only one paying for it.
The book does notice
Amelia eventually spends the secret rather than keeping it, and enjoys spending it. That is the closest the genre usually gets to admitting that managing a man’s feelings is unpaid work.
Novel 101
Things the book assumes you already know
Romance after the wedding
Almost every romance ends at the altar, which is a strange place to stop a story about love. This one starts there. A short guide to the subgenre that does.
What a tontine actually is
The wager the whole series runs on. This novella is where somebody first suggests out loud that making it may have brought a curse down on all of them.
Read directly from the novella, Kindle edition, and described in our own words. · Last Man Standing · Victoria Alexander · The Library