She was the only one who accepted me, the town outcast… After getting tangled up with the wrong guy in a bar, Lindsey is saved by a stranger. Cal Whitaker…the man she’s been looking for! He is the only person who can renovate her boutique and restore the town’s outdoor music hall! But after rejecting his hometown, he’s not the most popular person. However, Lindsey sees a kindness underneath his unfriendly attitude that calls out to her. She’s even ready to give her body and soul to Cal, but he’s leaving after the renovations are finished…

A FORCED MARRIAGE Traveling unchaperoned with the eligible Lord Hal Wyatt would seriously harm Sophia Haydon's reputation–except that she already knew herself to be a ruined woman.

When Theodora visits the manor of her late aunt, she’s suddenly reunited with Damon, the town’s rebel and a man whom she hasn’t seen in seven years. Back then, Damon called her naive and teased her with a kiss. She’s been unable to forget him ever since. Now faced with the opportunity to work with him, Theodora decides to use this chance to settle her feelings for Damon. How is it possible, though, that he’s become even more dangerously enchanting?

This book explores how postmillennial Anglophone women writers use romantic narrativisations of history to explore, revise, repurpose and challenge the past in their novels, exposing the extent to which past societies were damaging to women by instead imagining alternative histories. The novelists discussed employ the generic conventions of romance to narrate their understanding of historical and contemporary injustice and to reflect upon women’s achievements and the price they paid for autonomy and a life of public purpose. The volume seeks, firstly, to discuss the work of revision or reparation being performed by romantic historical fiction and, secondly, to analyse how the past is being repurposed for use in the present. It contends that the discourses and genre of romance work to provide a reparative reading of the past, but there are limitations and entrenched problems in such readings.

This book, the first full-length cross-period comparison of medieval and modern literature, offers cutting edge research into the textual and cultural legacy of the Middle Ages: a significant and growing area of scholarship. At the juncture of literary, cultural and gender studies, and capitalizing on a renewed interest in popular western representations of the Islamic east, this book proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.