Narrated by Charlotte North
An Heiress to Remember, book three in Maya Rodale’s Gilded Age Girls Club series, is a second-chance, antagonists-to-lovers romance set in vibrant, bustling turn-of-the-century New York City. The story of young lovers torn asunder who reunite later in life is a familiar one, but while it’s fairly well done, the main story here is really that of a woman coming fully into her own, and sometimes the love story feels as though it’s been put into the back seat.
Eighteen-year-old department store heiress Beatrice Goodwin has fallen in love with her father’s protégé, Wes Dalton, son of an Irish immigrant family, but when we first meet them, she’s about to say goodbye. Her family is pressuring her to marry an English duke; Wes urges Beatrice to reject the duke’s offer and run away with him instead – but Beatrice is terribly torn. She loves Wes, but where will she be if she disobeys her parents? How can she refuse to do the thing she’s been brought up to do – make a prestigious marriage and do her duty to her family?
Sixteen years later, Beatrice returns to New York a divorcée, and is determined to live her own life on her own terms, regardless of what anyone thinks or says. Divorcing a duke has put her pretty much beyond the pale socially anyway, and to her mother’s dismay, Beatrice makes it clear she has absolutely no interest in remarrying. She is, however, interested in what is happening with Goodwin’s, New York’s premier department store and the basis of her family’s fortune. To her consternation, it’s been going down the pan since her father’s death thanks to her brother’s mis-management, and its place as THE place to shop has been taken by the impressive store across the street, one so famous that it doesn’t even have its name on a sign outside – because everyone knows Dalton’s.
At first, Beatrice doesn’t connect the name with her old love. At eighteen, Wes had next to nothing, so the thought that he could possibly have become one of the richest men in the city – the country, even – just doesn’t occur to her. Until she storms furiously into a meeting convened by her brother to discuss the sale of Goodwin’s – and comes face-to-face with Wes Dalton for the first time in sixteen years.
Wes has spent those sixteen years working towards getting his revenge on the Goodwins. His mantra is: “My name is Wes Dalton. You stole my love and insulted my honour. I have sworn revenge.”
(Did anyone else hear “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” at that point?)
He’s poised to get the very thing he’s been working towards – to buy Goodwin’s and run it into the ground as his final revenge – but Beatrice’s return puts a large spoke in the wheel when she announces her plan to take over Goodwin’s and return it to its former glory as the number one shopping destination in New York.
From then on, the gloves are off, as Beatrice and Wes go head-to-head as business rivals. Beatrice has problems initially when many of the men on her staff won’t take instructions from her (grrrr) but comes up with a satisfactory solution to that – and very soon her drive and innovative ideas are pulling in the crowds like never before.
Wes is both irritated and fascinated by Beatrice; he admires the strong independent woman she has become, and is secretly pleased at having such a worthy opponent. He’s also just as strongly attracted to her now as he was all those years before, perhaps even moreso, and as it becomes clear that the same is true for Beatrice, they agree to an affair, to become “rivals by day, lovers by night.”
There’s no Big Mis in this story and no drawn-out angst; there’s nothing really stopping Wes and Beatrice from being together if they want to, but wanting to is the key. Beatrice married to please her parents and spent sixteen years in a loveless marriage, doing as she was told, stifled by convention and the life of an English duchess, and she has no wish to once again put herself under the control of a man. Her divorced status allows her a much larger degree of freedom than she’s ever had before, and it’s something she isn’t ready to give up and possibly won’t ever be. I enjoyed watching Beatrice gain confidence in her abilities as president of the store and also in the rekindling of her romance with Wes; she’s older and wiser and not afraid to ask for what she wants. Wes is a lovely hero – he’s witty and clever and caring, and eventually comes to realise that the last sixteen years haven’t been about revenge at all, and that really he’s been driven by the need to prove he’s good enough – for Beatrice, for society, for anyone who dismissed him before.
On the downside, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Wes was more invested in the relationship than Beatrice was (there was one point where I thought she did something really shitty in order to steal a march on him) – he puts himself out there, but she’s not prepared to meet him even half-way, and while I understand why she was wary of committing again, in a romance novel, I like the hero and heroine to choose each other before anything else, and I’m not completely convinced Beatrice would have done that had the story not taken the direction it did. And while I’m on that subject; there’s a sub-plot running through the story about various acts of vandalism visited on Goodwin’s – the mirrors are smashed in the ladies’ room; the reading room is trashed – but the identity of the culprit is little more than an aside. I know this isn’t a mystery, but there was no time at all devoted to that storyline other than “this stuff happened” and then all we got was “this person did it.”
I enjoyed listening to Charlotte North in book one of this series, Duchess by Design, so I knew I’d was in safe hands with this one. Her performance is well paced, her enunciation is clear and her character differentiation is excellent; Beatrice’s friends in the Ladies of Liberty are easy to tell apart so there’s no confusion in their scenes together, and she portrays the male characters equally well, affecting a slight drop in pitch to portray Wes, giving Connor’s dialogue a sharper edge, and oozing condescending pomposity as Goodwin’s store manager, Mr. Stephens. The intensity she gives to Wes’ dialogue is very much in character, as is the way she conveys Beatrice’s backbone of steel and her determination to live life for herself.
An Heiress to Remember boasts a decent, though not especially memorable romance and an engaging, though not especially memorable central couple, hence a middling grade for the story. It’s an ‘okay’ historical, but not one I plan to return to.
Caz
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