Today's Special - - Theresa Romain

It's my pleasure to welcome Theresa Romain back to The Romance Dish today.  Theresa's newest historical romance, TO CHARM A NAUGHTY COUNTESS was released May 6th.   Janga's 5-star review of the book was posted here yesterday.  You can read it by clicking here.  

You can find more information about Theresa and her books by visiting her website and connect with her online at Facebook and Twitter.  

Take it away, Theresa!

When a Duke Has to Be a Duke

PJ and Andrea, thanks for hosting me today at The Romance Dish! I’m so glad to join you to chat about the release of my newest Regency-set historical romance, To Charm a Naughty Countess.

I’ve written heroes with titles before. I’ve also written a few mere Misters. But the hero of To Charm a Naughty Countess—Michael, Duke of Wyverne—is the first duke to get a HEA in one of my books.

Dukes and duchesses stand on the highest rung of the aristocracy, just under the monarchy itself. They’re synonymous with wealth and power and influence. Or are they?

I wanted to play around with the idea of what a duke, and a dukedom, could represent in this book.  Eccentric, brilliant Michael has no influence at all in society, because he’s stayed away from London for 11 years since rumors of his madness began to spread.

And as To Charm a Naughty Countess begins, he doesn’t have wealth either. He has lost a fortune due to the real-life “Year Without a Summer,” a period of freezing temperatures in 1816 that caused crop failures throughout Europe. Here’s how Michael views the situation:

The damned winter. Until this year, Michael trusted two things in the world: his own judgment and his land. But this year, spring had never come, and it seemed summer would also fail to make an appearance. For months, the world had lain under a chilly frost. And now Michael couldn’t trust the land, and no one else trusted his judgment.

Faced with financial ruin, he has to venture to London to catch a wealthy bride. This is easier said than done, since those old questions about his sanity pop up again as soon as he re-enters society (and turns a chair upside-down…and takes a lamp apart…and…well, you get the idea. He’s a tinkerer). He needs help if he’s ever going to succeed—and who better to help him than London’s most popular widow, Caroline, Lady Stratton?

Caroline seems to be a soap bubble of a person, all fragile gloss. But she knows, and Michael soon learns, that there’s much more to her. She asks questions he’s never considered before, about the responsibilities that almost consume him:

*          *          *

She lifted her chin. “Have you made your own decision, then?”

“About what?”


“About how you’ll spend your life.”


“There’s nothing to decide. As I was born the heir to a dukedom, I’ve always known how I would spend my life.”

“No, that’s how you spend your time.”

He narrowed his eyes. On another man, this might have seemed a glare, but Caroline could tell it for an expression of careful scrutiny. “I do not perceive the difference.”

“My point exactly. You are a duke, first and foremost—but you’ve also become a duke solely.”

All right, perhaps those narrowed eyes were a glare after all.

*          *          *

Before they can find their way to a HEA, Caroline and Michael have to find balance—not just in their relationship, but within themselves. When a duke has to be a duke all the time, how is he ever to find a duchess?

Don’t worry; I promise you he does. J And by the end of their story, they bring out the best in each other.

Today I’ll give a copy of To Charm a Naughty Countess to one random commenter with a US or Canada address. Just let me know: what do you think you’d like most about being a duchess (or duke, if male readers happen by)? Or what do you think would be the toughest part?

Review - - To Charm a Naughty Countess

To Charm a Naughty Countess

By Theresa Romain

Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca

Release Date: May 6, 2014

Michael Layward, Duke of Wyverne, much prefers his busy life on his estate in Lancanshire reclaiming land for planting and researching ways steam power can make his estate more productive. But it is 1816, the Year Without a Summer, and Wyverne’s fields are yielding little, barely enough to feed his tenants. His coffers are empty, and his credit is gone. Necessity drives him to London, a place he has managed to avoid for eleven years. His only hope for meeting his responsibilities and seeing the duchy prosper is to find a wealthy bride who is willing to exchange her fortune for his title. Michael knows his search will not be easy. Few women will be eager to ally themselves with the “Mad Duke,” a title Michael’s eccentricities, reclusiveness, and intolerance for society has earned him.

Caroline Graves, Countess of Stratton, is enjoying the freedom and power afforded by her status as a wealthy widow except for the suitors who lust after her beauty and fortune. It is her desire to escape from the most importunate of them that leads her to claim she has promised a dance to Wyverne. Michael and Caroline share a history that both would prefer to forget but which is etched painfully and indelibly in both their memories. If Caroline can help Michael find the wealthy wife he needs, maybe she can increase her popularity in London by accomplishing the impossible feat of making the mad duke’s bride hunt successful and maybe she can forget Michael as well.

Fresh peach cobbler has been one of my favorite desserts since I was a very little girl eating it just out of the oven in my grandmother’s kitchen. After decades of relishing its taste, I still love it. The basic ingredients of Georgia peaches, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon juice with bits of sweet crust make a luscious dish, but every once in a while I happen across a variation that includes something surprising--a touch of  butterscotch or ginger or rhubarb—that awakens my taste buds and gives me a new appreciation for an old favorite. By now you’re probably thinking this reviewer is as mad as Romain’s duke hero was purported to be, but trust me a few seconds longer. I promise to tie my recipe ruminations and review together. Historical romance is like my grandmother’s peach cobbler: beloved, familiar, and reliably delicious. To Catch a Naughty Countess is the new variation: a combination of familiar elements and new ingredients that delights in myriad ways.

I couldn’t begin to count the duke heroes I have encountered across decades of reading historical romance, but Michael is an original. He is brilliant and brave, with a rough honesty and a thinly veiled vulnerability that I found immensely appealing. He suffers from social anxiety disorder and thus is terrified of humiliating himself by proving inadequate in social situations and thereby confirming that he is as mad as the rumors proclaim him. Not since Jennifer Ashley’s Ian Mackenzie have I found a hero as courageous, poignant, and ultimately as admirable as Michael. I adored him.

Caroline is just as wonderful in a different way. Having once been limited to only the power her beauty gave her, she fully understands and enjoys the far greater power she possesses as a widow with both beauty and wealth. Her strength is credible because it is rooted in the realities of who she is as an individual and as a woman of her particular time and class. She also has a practical wisdom, an appealing lightness that is anything but shallow, and a generous spirit. What she wants most is something readers will understand—to be seen and loved for who she truly is.

I’ve been a Theresa Romain fan since her debut with Season for Temptation, but I think To Charm a Naughty Countess is her best book yet. It charmed this reader into an immediate reread in order to savor the many things I loved about it. If you are a reader who appreciates traditional historical romance, protagonists who are out of the ordinary, and endings that are satisfyingly romantic but with a realistic touch that makes them more believable, I highly recommend this book.

~Janga