Eroticism in To Have and To Hold by Patricia Gaffney

I recently read Patricia Gaffney's To Have and To Hold for the first time. If I'd only read the first section of the book (a bit less than half), I could easily interpret it as an erotic novel, though one without much explicit sex. To explain why I think that, first I have to talk about the book as a whole.There's a lot of discussion of this novel mostly because of its hero, aristocrat