Book Review: "Wedding Knight" - by Celeste Bradley

"Wedding Knight" is a short story appearing in the anthology, My Scandalous Bride. It is the 4th tale in Celeste Bradley's "Liar's Club" series of regency romances. It tells the story of Kitty Trapp, whom we have met in the first couple of Liar's Club books - most notably in The Impostor - and one Alfred Theodious Knight (aka "Knight").

Synopsis: Knight is in the market for a wife, preferably one who is respectable, obedient, and will not embarrass him in any way. He settles for Bitty Trapp, the spoiled and rather brainless twin sister of our heroine, Kitty. Unfortunately, Bitty doesn't want to marry Knight, so *****SPOILER ALERT***** she convinces her identical twin to pose as Knight's bride to give her "time to adjust" to the idea of being married to him. Loyal Kitty goes through with the charade, only to find that her sister has skipped town during the ceremony and is nowhere to be found. Now Kitty must pose as Knight's wife until her sister can be found. She doesn't like the idea of deceiving the man so unfairly. Add to that the fact that Knight is pretty bossy and controlling, always telling his new bride what she can and cannot do or say or wear... To while away the time until her sister turns up, Kitty decides to set Knight straight on a few things in order to make him a more bearable husband for her sister. Of course, if Knight finds out the truth, it will mean the scandal of the century - which is the last thing he wants.

I really enjoyed this story. I'm usually not too crazy about short stories all that much because either they are too short for the romance to develop believably OR you get really into the story/characters and then it's all over too quickly. This story was the latter. I already liked Kitty's character a lot from when we'd seen her in previous books. She is plucky and has a knack for making lemonade when life hands her lemons. And she gets lots of lemons. Knight is kind of a lemon, but she works pretty hard to bring out his nice qualities from beneath his grumpy exterior. And, to his credit, he's not completely awful. He recognizes his wife's good qualities: her cleverness, her wit, her sense of humor, her fierce bravery. No one else has ever noticed, much less admired, these qualities in her. I thought it was kind of funny how the very things he admires in her are the things that he professes to dislike as qualities in a wife.

I gave this one 5 stars in my catalog