A Duke in Shining Armor by Loretta Chase

Ripley and Olympia are a great team, and their chemistry is also great. He’s consistent about being wry, funny, and loyal. He seems to be one person with his friends and another with everyone else. As is so often the case in books about a rake, he sets his rakish ways aside to help Olympia. Ripley and his friends are known as the Dis-Graces for their rakish ways, which consist of brawling, drinking, and having sex with willing partners. My own method is rather more complex, and I can hold forth on the topic for about twenty times longer than listeners can bear to hear it.” Thomas Jefferson, who applied Bacon’s table of science to the organization of books. Worse, I have a System, inspired by the American president, Mr. “I can prose on about first editions and Maioli’s Library and early copperplate engravings until my listeners keel over in a dead faint. “You don’t know me as I truly am,” she said darkly. She’s also just the right amount of nerdy: She’s both strong-willed (she says she has to be, because she has six brothers) and kind. Voted “Most Boring Girl of the Season” for seven years in a row, Olympia is both horrified and thrilled by her own escapades. She appreciates their monetary value, she appreciates their beauty, and of course she reads them. Olympia also charmed me by being a rather obsessive collector of rare books. The one thing they can’t seem to get over is that they’ve clearly fallen for each other, and of course Ripley feels that he cannot make off with the bride of his best friend.Īlong the way, Olympia rescues a dog. Eventually they take shelter with Ripley’s slightly eccentric aunt and proceed to clear up misunderstandings with remarkable clarity. Ripley catches Olympia in the act and since he can’t let a drunk bride stagger about the streets on her own, he goes with her. Minutes before the wedding, Olympia gets drunk on brandy, panics, and escapes in all her wedding finery out the window.

Ashmont has two best friends: Ripley and Blackwood.

The ridiculously named heroine, Olympia Hightower, is supposed to get married to The Duke of Ashmont.

If it had had a kraken, a cat, and someone earnestly trying to explain a scientific concept with their shirt off, we would have achieved the Carrie Singularity and I would have been sucked into the pages never to return. It has an eccentric and acerbic old lady. How DARE this book be over? How DARE it be so incredibly perfect and constructed almost completely of Carrie Bait? It has a book collector. And do you know why? Because I purposely kept putting it down once I realized that eventually I would RUN OUT OF BOOK. I should have been able to read A Duke in Shining Armor in a day.

A Duke in Shining Armor by Loretta Chase