This is a wonderful story. I thoroughly enjoyed it and know I will read it again and again. It concerns the love story of two exquisitely drawn characters who leap off the page fully formed and stay in the mind long after the book has ended.

Genevieve Maitland is a woman out of her time. She is intelligent, intellectual and has all the skills of a born leader. However, these attributes were not required of a woman in Regency England. As the sister of a widowed Countess, she is living as a companion to the Countess's mother in law, and on the charity of the new Earl, Kit Carrington, who up until this moment has preferred sailing the seven seas to claiming his heritage. She knew Kit some years previously when he was one of the more respected captains serving under her grandfather, General Maitland, in the Spanish wars. Genevieve is disappointed and annoyed that Kit seems to be shirking his responsibilities to his family and his widowed step-mother in particular.

Kit Carrington has returned to England to support his young stepsister at her wedding and is keen to get back to his ship "The Hesperus" and return to his life of trade and adventure. He finds Genevieve efficiently managing his grandmother's household, pulling strings and working hard to find prospective husbands for her sister and for Kit's stepmother. He is somewhat affronted! However, he finds himself, reluctantly, physically attracted to Genevieve.

What follows their first meeting is an exhilarating, witty and entrancing courtship dance that reminded me a little of Beatrice and Benedict and Petruchio and Katherina. The verbal sparring, the advance and retreat, the misunderstanding and reconciliations all come together in a glorious whole that makes my heart sing.

I loved watching Kit as he falls in love with Genevieve. He is gorgeous, uber-sexy and has an engaging compulsion towards self reflection. He fights his attraction at first, dismissing it as just lust but the more he learns about Genevieve, the more he admires her intelligence, her stoicism, her efforts to secure the best future she can for those she cares for. As he comes to understand the difficulties she lives with on a daily basis and as he discovers each new facet of her character his heart becomes increasingly engaged until he realises with some shock that he is in love with her.

As much as I fell in love with Kit, it was Genevieve who spoke to me most. How hard it must have been to hide her intelligence and intellectual pursuits. How difficult it must have been to sublimate her leadership skills into organising family matters when, had she been born male, she could have made her mark in the world as a leader in her own right. How hard it must have been to rely on the charity of others as an indigent relation and to have to scheme for a way to make a life for herself. And yet Genevieve is loving, compassionate and honest in the way reacts to Kit and the effect he has on her.

There is a very cinematic quality to the book. Scenes on the dance floor, theatre, beach and The Hesperus are very vivid and serve to highlight and enhance the different stages of their romance. A host of supporting characters are brought to life with a delicate touch and each has a vital role to play in emphasising aspects of the protagonists' characters and motivations. I particularly enjoyed the imperious Dowager Countess in all her horror and had a sneaking sympathy for Julian, Kit's kind but ineffectual cousin.

All in all, this is a gorgeous book: a social commentary with depth, a witty, romantic and sexy love story with wonderfully vivid characters. I just loved it. ( )