Grace Cabot's mother is mad, slowly losing her memory and her knowledge of the family around her. Grace's stepfather has just died and her stepbrother is about to get married and kick Grace, along with her three sisters and her insane mother, out of the family mansion. Grace is desperate to force a marriage before the ton discovers she has no dowry to speak of and her mother is going mad.

Grace intends to entrap Amherst, a young buck, into matrimony. She engineers the discovery of an illicit embrace with Amherst, only to discover when the lights come on that it is his dour older brother Jeffrey, the Earl of Merryton, whom she has ensnared. Forced to wed Merryton in scandal, she finds him to be inflexible and incommunicative.

Jeffrey requires a rigid schedule and symmetry in his life to control his anxiety and his repetitive sexual thoughts. He counts to eight constantly in an attempt to rein in his lascivious thoughts of woman-on-woman sex and his desires for light BDSM. Grace turns Jeffrey's world and his carefully ordered universe topsy-turvy, creating deeper stress for him that makes him crave the symmetry and repetitiveness of the number eight even more.

I can think of a number of books in the last several years that have presented men with psychiatric disorders that have been sympathetic heroes that I have fallen in love with over the course of the story. Jeffrey does not fall in this category. His OCD behaviors made me vaguely uncomfortable throughout the whole book. Grace tries some light kink in the bedroom to satisfy his lustful fantasies, and the scene felt awkward to me.

I have been a faithful reader of Julia London for many years, and will definitely read her next book when it releases, but THE DEVIL TAKES A BRIDE did not work for me.