Forever My Duke 
by Olivia Drake
St. Martin’s Press, 2020

Before he’s even 30 years old, Hadrian Ames, the Duke of Clayton, is as hardened a cynic as any nobleman three times his age. When readers meet him in the opening pages of Forever My Duke, the second book in Olivia Drake’s “Unlikely Duchesses” series, he’s on his way to marry his 18-year-old cousin Lady Ellen, daughter of Lord and Lady Godwin, long-time friends of his family. Ten years before, he’d been betrothed to marry the couple’s oldest girl, Audrey, when she’d scandalized both his family and her own by suddenly eloping with a preacher and leaving the country for parts unknown. To a greater extent than Clayton is perhaps willing to admit, this disruption has made him the kind of cynical prude who reflexively says things like “Love! What balderdash!”.

So he’s traveling to the Godwins to plight his troth with Lady Ellen - not because he loves her, but because he thinks it’s time he got married and set up his nursery, and she’ll do as well for being the Duchess of Clayton as anybody else. Although Clayton himself keeps his spirits up, it’s a joyless errand he’s on. 

A joyless errand that’s derailed by a freak March ice storm forcing Clayton to take shelter in a seedy little wayside inn, and once he’s there, he and his long-suffering valet are subjected not only to sub-standard food but to an absolute barrage of coincidences. An adorable little boy darts into Clayton’s room at random. He’s playing a game of hide-and-seek with his guardian, an American woman named Natalie Fanshawe, who quickly follows him into the Duke’s room - where the two are instantly enamored of each other. He looks at her:

Pretty seemed too tame a word to describe her … Her skin had a healthy glow as if she’d spent a good deal of time outdoors without a parasol. The cinnamon-hued gown with its long sleeves and plain scoop neckline would be considered pitifully drab by London standards, yet it skimmed her feminine curves in a way that lent her a natural flair.

And a bit later, when Natalie coincidentally collides with Clayton, she observes:

His otherwise impressive face was a study in masculine angles, from the firm jaw and smooth-shaven cheeks to the dark eyebrows and rather haughty nose. He had toffee-brown hair, the strands as perfectly groomed as the rest of him. 

In a way, instant physical attraction between hero and heroine is the ne plus ultra of coincidences, but Olivia Drake has one further doozy in store: the little boy is the orphan son of none other than Audrey, who’d recently died with her husband in America, and Natalie, their dearest friend, is bringing the boy back to his grandparents, Lord and Lady Godwin. And since Natalie and her charge missed the local mail coach, they’ll be going to the Godwin ancestral home in the company of Clayton himself, who employs a bit of understatement when he calls all this “a bona fide fluke of fate.” 

Natalie is an egalitarian American who considers herself the social equal to everybody, whether it’s President Madison or the eighth Duke of Clayton (when she first hears him referred to as “Your Grace,” she’s confused, since he sure doesn’t look like an archbishop). And Clayton wants no exotic drama like the kind his cousin Audrey introduced into his family. 

Thus with the minimum of fuss made possible by the maximum of fortune, Drake sets up a tale of opposites colliding. This was done equally efficiently in the previous “Unlikely Duchess” book, The Duke I Once Knew, and this latest book shares both the charm and the curiously rough-edged moments of its predecessor. Readers with an aversion to bona fide flukes of fate will need to brace themselves, since there are more flukes here than in a pod of whales. But long-time Olivia Drake fans will be smiling on every page of this delightful story.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.