Contemporary romance writer Liz Fielding is one of the few writers I will consistently read category romances from. Once upon a time I read practically anything I could get my hands on done by Harlequin, met my first Regency Romance and decided that contemporaries just weren't romantic enough anymore. Liz Fielding changed my mind and I thank her for it.

This book has been on my interest list for a few months, though I forget how I found out about it. Surfing Amazon I suspect, but at any rate it looked interesting. Then of course it had a look a like, trading places, hiding in plain sight etc etc and it moved up my list of romances to buy. Though almost more than the romance herein, I enjoyed the counterplay between Annie and George. Even before mutual attraction enters the bargain the two of them spark off each other in a wholly wonderful way.

George doesn't come off as a guy you want to cuddle with--his first interaction with Annie is fraught with tension, anger and family issues that she stumbled into unwittingly. They both come off on entirely the wrong foot in fact--she seems like a complete dunce, with no common sense or brains to give her life and he is a brute. She doesn't back down. And this is important to note because part of the reason she was escaping her 'Lady Rose' life was because she couldn't find the voice to tell her Grandfather that she wanted her own life.

Their time together is considered a whirlwind, at best, but Annie's innate sense of righting wrongs and helping people has her unconsciously trying to 'fix' George's problems with his daughter, his father, his life. George, beyond lust, is suspicious of Annie, but wants to protect her. Learn about her. Save her from whatever she was running from.

I liked the fact that Fielding had a definite 'tone' for Annie that was distinctly different from the other characters. Even as she relaxed and became a more 'ordinary' girl, her phraseology and gestures made it abundantly clear that she was born royalty. Born learning to be diplomatic, consoling, confident. After George figures things out she even uses it to her advantage, purposely teasing him.

The secondary characters--Hetty (George's mom), Xandra (George's daughter) and George (George's dad) were given less fleshing/embellishing, but weren't just ornaments to the story. Xandra was the teenager from hell, and the relationship between her and George was tidied up a little too nicely, but its Christmas. You get to have tidy bows in Christmas stories.

The companion novel, that talks about Annie's double (Lydia)'s adventures in the desert will certainly be interesting to read. Lydia, from the brief time we saw her, was much more down to earth, so it will be interesting to see how exactly she responds to 'royal' life. Plus we'll get to see what happened when she disappeared. ( )

Cute story of a rich famous girl who runs away from her life to experience the real world. Sweet clean romance. ( )

that was just lovely. now off to its pair ( )

Lady Rose Napier needs a break. Orphaned at six when her parents, the Marquess and Marchioness of St. Ives, were tragically gunned down on a charity mission, she's lived most of her sheltered life as a media darling. When other teenage girls were dating and hanging out, she was visiting hospitals and posing for photo ops to raise money for charity. Her grandfather the duke has kept tight control over her life, reminding her of her duty whenever she chafed under his wing.

Now 28, worn out by the attention and seeing her grandfather not-so-subtly engineering a marriage to a viscount she feels nothing for, she decides to make a break for it. A few arrangements with a lookalike to play stand-in and she's off to the country!

George Saxon is some kind of billionaire expatriate - I don't feel we ever really find out what he does exactly - back in England to visit his father, who's in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. As he's arguing with his rebellious 15 year old daughter in the garage bay of his family's home and auto repair business, a service call comes in, which George reluctantly heeds.

When George and Annie - as she prefers to be addressed - meet, the sparks fly. He thinks she's a flighty ditz, and she thinks he's an arrogant grouch. And they're both right.

Fielding does a wonderful job with these characters. By the diction alone in the dialog, I could hear Annie's posh accent. She behaves believably for someone raised as she was. Her naivete and privilege shows its head when it comes to details like paying for parking, driving, dealing with a car breakdown or cooking. She's out of her element in these things and her confusion shows. However, she's not stupid, and she figures these things out. Indeed, she enjoys being treated normally and being expected to fend for herself. Watching her bluff George into fixing her car or wing it when asked to make dinner was a treat. Far from farcical, we see Annie's confidence and competence bloom through these tasks.

Through his battles with his daughter and father, we see a man quite the opposite of Annie. Here's a man who has battled hard to earn everything he has. After working in the garage as a teenager, learning as much as he could until as skilled as any mechanic out there, he attended university, against his father's wishes, then forged his own path in business. In a way, his path mirrors Annie's. She's lived her life as people expected and is just now beginning to rebel where George has forged his own path but is now so worn down that he's tempted to do what everyone expects him to do.

This opposition creates a rich romance between these two. As they fall for each other and George learns her true identity, you see them shoring each other up. Annie quietly encourages him to keep fighting to repair his relationship with his daughter and to not give up on the garage. George helps her make her peace with who she is and the good she can do by just being Lady Rose while staying true to herself.

This is very much a whirlwind romance. The courtship takes place over the course of two weeks and ends in a marriage. Their complementary personalities and rather restrained courtship makes the HEA believable though. This is clearly love, not blind lust.

Altogether, this is a lovely Christmas romance from Fielding. The characters are fully fleshed, warts and all, the dialog natural and the prose fluid. I’ll certainly keep an eye out for her other titles.
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