However, the pair can’t seem to stop themselves falling madly in lust and then in love. Of course, the will has further surprises, and various people stand to benefit if they can prove Blake and Sam’s marriage to be a lie.

As I said, I really shouldn’t like this series as much as I do, and I got through the issues around Blake’s money and family situation largely by ignoring the problems and forcing myself not to wonder about who was taking care of the ancestral home and farms while Blake was dealing primarily with his other business interests in the US.īlake and Samantha marry for the money: once he inherits, they can divorce and she’ll walk away with sufficient funds to take care of her sister for life. Meanwhile, Blake has inherited a dukedom, but his father’s will stipulates that he must marry before his upcoming birthday in order to inherit a fortune even larger than the one Blake has amassed by himself (and therein lies my main problem with the series: old, landed aristocratic families don’t tend to work that way for more reasons than I have space to list). Her father was jailed for major financial crimes, after which her mother committed suicide and her sister took an overdose leaving her requiring 24-hour care, all of which have left Sam very cynical. Sam runs Alliance, a matchmaking service dedicated to bringing people together, whose life plans match rather than with any romantic aims. The shortest and the most problematic book in the series, Wife by Wednesday introduces us to Sam and Blake, whose friends and families will make up the central characters for pretty much the whole series. This being Romancelandia, some of those carefully matched couples can’t help falling in love in spite of the rules, of course, and that’s part of the fun of the series.

On the other hand, I do like the central premise of the series as a whole: a matchmaking service that places couples together on entirely non-romantic criteria. The first book in particular made some glaringly wrong assumptions about the British aristocracy and inheritance laws, most of which could have been quickly fixed by Googling (My review copies of the first two books were the self-published versions and I noticed that the errors had been fixed in the third and fourth books, so maybe the republished first two have had the same fixes applied). I really shouldn’t have enjoyed this series as much as I did. Stevie’s Duckies Do Series review of The Weekday Brides Series by Catherine BybeeĬontemporary Romance published by Montlake Romance

Fiancé by Friday by Catherine Bybee