A Lady Awakened by Cecelia Grant

This book is delightful.

Martha has to be with child within the month, in order to save her house and the women who serve there. So she makes a deal with her neighbour Theo Mirkwood – infamous cad that he is. She will buy his services, every day for a month, in order to get pregnant. To her, it is a business deal. She will take no pleasure from it. To Theo, it’s a challenge to make her take pleasure from him.
For a book that’s about two people whose entire relationship is sexual, there isn’t much sex in it. They spend a lot of time in bed, but when the act is functional, the description of it is too. You only get more detail when the sex become integral to how the characters are changing. I liked this very much.
Through the course of the book, Theo learns to see that managing his estate is more than just about numbers and notes, and that there are people involved. It turns out Theo is good with people. Martha has a tendency to try to do things along and fix things herself. She learns that sometimes, it’s good to have help and that, given the right push, people will often help themselves.
I had read the prequel novella A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong some time ago and really enjoyed it. I’m glad I tried this book, too.