A Warrior's Bride by Margaret Moore

Aileas is the daughter of Sir Thomas Dugail, a hardened warrior who seems to care more for the military readiness of his keep than the gentle raising of his daughter. She has grown into a woman more comfortable with soldiers and wearing breeches and muddy boots than doing womanly tasks and wearing gowns.

When Sir George deGramercie returns to Castle Dugail, it is with the express intention of marrying Aileas, at the behest of his father's deathbed request. Even though he is somewhat horrified by Aileas's manners and dress, he is enchanted with her beauty, and her slender, wiry body, which has known more exercise and battle than that of most women of her acquaintance. He finds himself powerfully attracted to her.

Aileas does not feel the same, however. She sees George's fine ways and extravagant clothing as weaknesses, and his kind manner as debauchery and sin. Besides, she is already in love with one of her father's knights, a red-headed warrior named Rufus Hamerton. He doesn't love her, though, but treats her more as a close friend, unable to see himself wooing, or wedding, Alieas.

Sharing the castle with Sir George gives her a better glimpse of him and his ways, and she finds that many of her initial impressions of him were wrong, and that she feels things that she never felt before when she smells his freshly-washed scent, or when he touches or kisses her. Even though she nearly drives him away by declaring that she does not wish to wed him, she eventually sees the light that this is the best man for her... for when she asks Rufus if he would marry her, he looks uncomfortable, and runs away. So she and George are engaged.

George returns home, but doubts begin to assail him about Aileas. Being a man who doesn't go back on his word, he puts his doubts aside and welcomes her into his home, even when she and her father arrive a day early for the ceremony. George has invited his cousin, Lady Margot de Pontypoole, to help Aileas with adjusting to her new home. Alieas sees the beautiful and well-mannered Lady Margot and immediately takes a dislike to her, thinking that George prefers Lady Margaret's company to her own. He doesn't but he does hope to change her over, having his cousin teach her table manners and how to dress.

Nevertheless, their wedding night astounds them both with the intensity of their passion, and the pleasure they feel in the marriage bed. But more obstacles await them as they try to make a life together. Aileas is totally ignorant of how to run a manor house, and has never been taught the sort of womanly tasks or duties that most women have. She cannot even read, despite being a Lord's daughter.

She does suspect that George's Steward is cheating him and stealing from him, and even though she cannot read, she suspects him and sets out to prove it. And when her manners and bearing do not improve after a short time, George begins getting more and more out of temper with her, trying to force her into acting as he wants.

It comes to a head with George accusing her of not being a maiden on her wedding night, since she cleaned up on her own when he was asleep. As relations between them grow colder, she desperately tries to conform to what he wants, but her own innate stubbornness keeps pushing them apart... until he comes home to find a visitor in their chambers, Lord Rufus.

For George, this is the last straw, and he and Rufus come to blows. Aileas tries to get between them when a blow from George knocks her into the table, where she hits her head and goes down. Thinking he's killed her, George remembers how, when he was young, he'd killed a young puppy after it disobeyed him, and how his father, while excusing him after a stern talking-to, had never quite respected him after that. And so he learned to rein in his emotions... until Aileas came along and freed them.

Aileas recovers, and George begs her pardon. She also succeeds in proving to him that his stewards are stealing from him, and they must track down one of the men, who has fled after killing his own brother, and Aileas's maid who was in on the scheme. But can their truce last? Is there real love in their future? Can George let Aileas be who she is without stifling her?

I liked this romance a lot. Aileas is a curious mixture of hoyden and innocent, having been raised in a manly fashion by her father, who dotes on her but ended up raising her in the same way he raised his sons... literally. At first, she thinks George weak, but then finds that he is in no way weak, just refined and cultured.

It is George deGramercie who has most of the growing up to do in this book, and that was a welcome change for me. George, it seems, has been suppressing his emotions all his life for fear of losing control again as he did with the puppy. But Aileas makes him lose all control, both of his heart and his emotions. He started out thinking that he had to change her, but in the end, it is he who ends up changing the most.

Admittedly, in the past on this blog, I have said I hate books where the woman is always wrong, always has to be steered right by the man. Well, this story could have gone in that direction and didn't, and I found it to be very much to my taste.