Cecilia Grant's A Lady Awakened
I'm aware that there's a trope in romance wherein a lady pays a guy to marry her, knock her up, and quietly divorce her (though obviously, it never gets to that last one), and this is soooooort of along those lines: our heroine is young and recently widowed, and her husband's terrible brother will inherit the estate (the estate she has worked SO HARD to improve! She's re-thatched roofs and started a school!) UNLESS she turns out to be pregnant with an heir. She knows she's not, and she has one month to rectify that--with the help of the new gentleman next door, exiled from London for his mildly dissolute ways. She'll give him a bunch of money in exchange for daily . . . deposits. This actually turns out to be hilarious, because she does NOT enjoy the act (her husband was also the worst, I guess it runs in the family) and her thoughts about the proceedings are GREAT. Eventually she gets into things . . . like 2/3 of the way through! Meanwhile, she's educating him on landlord stuff and they're improving both their estates in big ways. It's super cute, if paternalistic. I liked how things wrapped up and I liked the writing here a lot. This is the first in a series, and I'll definitely be reading the others. A-.
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