Readsalot81

**** posted as a guest review over at paranormalhaven.com***** Any Duchess Will Do is Tessa Dare’s latest novel within her Spindle Cove series. I loved A Lady By Midnight and absolutely thought that she’d be unable to top the awesomeness that was the previous book. Well, the author proved me wrong, and the end result was a charming, engaging read from start to finish. Tessa Dare has become one of my go-to authors for historical romance, and this book proves why she’s one of my favorite historical romance authors.Griffin York, the Duke of Halford, wakes up to find himself abducted by his own mother and whisked to the town of Spindle Cove and is told by the Duchess to pick a woman, any woman as his future bride. Griff selects the most unsuitable woman there, the serving girl, Pauline Simms. Pauline, for her part, quickly grasps what’s going on, and makes a deal with Griff. Submit to his mother’s teachings for a week, be an abject failure, and go home with enough funds for her to live off of for a lifetime.Pauline, while not the most sophisticated of women, is unpretentious and bright. Her intelligence and forthright manner quickly beguiles the Duke, while she in turn, slowly realizes there’s more to Griffin than what she originally thought. I really enjoyed Pauline as the heroine. She has no flights of fancy about marrying Griff, she wants to get back home to Spindle Cove to open her bookstore and take care of her younger sister. She’s extremely comfortable in her own skin and has no qualms about telling Griff or his mother how ridiculous certain things are in the aristocracy.My only real issue with the book stems from how Griffin’s character is presented. We’re supposed to believe a he’s a lazy ne’er do well, but his actions, to me, never came across as such. Both Griff and his mother pretty much state the same thing about his character, but it was never really demonstrated as such. He’s been hiding something extremely important from his mother, but while Pauline is able to ascertain the truth, this isn’t revealed to his mother until the bitter end. This, in large part, explains a great deal about why he’s been behaving the way he has for some time.As the ending the approached, I was slightly apprehensive about how she was going to wrap things up. As much as the romance between the two of them was delightful, the difference in their stations was seemingly insurmountable, and having Pauline be accepted into Polite Society without a huge ruckus being made seemed very unlikely. But the author not only managed to make the ending fit the story, but also made it seem exceedingly natural. Very well done.