Review: A Good Match for the Major by Josie Bonham (2020)

This is a new-to-me author with an excellent realisation of the Regency, a nice mix of characters and a story that, while not venturing into terribly original territory, is a very pleasant and slightly steamy read.

Here’s the premise: Lady Eliza Wyndham is the daughter of a marquess, whose first, brief marriage was miserable. He was a fortune hunter whose seemingly amiable nature vanished as soon as they left the church. Now she’s back home with her younger brother Max, the current marquess, and quite happy to stay unmarried for the rest of her days, helping out around the parish, acting as patron to the village school and supporting her brother. Major Nathaniel Overton (Nat) has moved to the estate next door where he is heir to his elderly uncle. The two meet in spectacular fashion, when Nat sets his horse to jump a hedge and finds himself directly in front of Eliza’s gig. The gig is overturned and Eliza ends up in a muddy ditch. Immediately the two are sparring with surprising hostility.

Needless to say, there are reasons for their aggression. Nat watched his parents killed in a carriage accident, and shock makes him abrupt with her. This forcefulness reminds Eliza of her husband, so they are very much on the back foot from the start. Naturally, despite their initial dislike of each other, they are then thrown together at every turn, both by accident and by gently conniving friends and relatives, who see the suitability of the match between neighbours.

The trouble they have is that they are unquestionably drawn to each other. This is largely physical, with both of them getting hot and bothered by… well, almost everything. There are a great many brushes of hands or thighs (Eliza seems to have quite a thing about Nat’s manly thighs), and meaningful gazes. I was a little surprised that Eliza is so readily aroused considering that her marriage was a disaster sexually (no details are given, only hints, so it’s hard to know exactly what happened, but it’s clear that she didn’t enjoy that aspect of marriage).

Nat’s progress along the road from dislike to attraction to thoughts of marriage is relatively smooth, disrupted only by mixed signals from Eliza. And boy, are those signals mixed! Eliza is the ultimate ditherer, veering sharply between desire and a determination to avoid men for the rest of her life. So one minute she’s encouraging him to kiss her, and the next she’s freezing him out. No wonder the poor man didn’t know how he stood — she didn’t know herself. I have to say, I strongly disapproved of all that kissing and cuddling, when she had no intention of taking things further. I understood what was driving her, but it was horribly unkind to the poor man.

Into all this dithering and angsting comes the dastardly villain, whose efforts to marry Eliza for her fortune (surprisingly large, despite the efforts of her fortune-hunter husband) become increasingly aggressive. Nat and all Eliza’s male relatives have to join forces to protect her. The plot veers somewhat into melodrama at this point, with a misunderstanding or two thrown in for good measure to slow our progress towards the inevitable happy ending.

A few minor grumbles. The book felt overlong, but that was largely because we got every last detail of every banal conversation (or so it seemed), so the dialogue could have done with tightening up. A few extra commas would have made some sentences easier to read, too. I only spotted a couple of historical errors. Dance cards really weren’t a thing this early (more of a Victorian tradition in England). The only bothersome error to me is that Lady Eliza Wyndham is sometimes called Lady Wyndham. I winced at that every time (but most people probably wouldn’t even notice).

I think this is the first publication by Josie Bonham. If so, it’s a very competent effort which I enjoyed very much, marred for me only by Eliza’s excessive mixed signals. The deeper theme, however, of how she could learn to trust a man again, was well drawn, and I completely got her reluctance to commit, despite all the helpful relations pushing her towards Nat. I just wish she could have been open with him, explained what the problem was and asked him to give her some time to grow used to him before she made an irrevocable decision. I could have used a little more humour, too. But this is a solid Regency with a slow-build romance, some drama and a heart-warming ending. There’s just one sex scene, and a whole heap of lusting. Four stars.