This enjoyable collection of three REGENCY CHRISTMAS WEDDINGS is full of merrymaking and mischief-making in the cold, snowy, jolly Christmas season.
 
Christine Merrill provides A MISTLETOE KISS FOR THE GOVERNESS. This is my favourite of the three novellas. A governess and young widow Charlotte Lewis has been caring for, teaching and chaperoning the daughters of Major Frederick Preston while he was away warring with Napoleon in the Peninsular War and the Battle of Waterloo. Now he’s returning home, with a leg injury and the prospect of relaxing in peacetime. He wasn’t expecting the governess he never met to be so young and attractive, though of course she dresses soberly and knows her place. If the girls have anything to do with it, that expectation of place is about to change.
 
Liz Tyner tells of THE EARL’S YULETIDE PROPOSAL. Adriana Armstrong is the cousin and paid companion of haughty young Lady Velma, who decides she can’t possibly marry Lord Philbrook after she hears he is less well-off than she’d believed. Adriana is despatched to tell the man with a letter. Edmond, Lord Philbrook, a returned soldier, wasn’t expecting a love match, and that being the case, he thinks Adriana might suit just as well for a wife. Neither Adriana nor Velma, for quite different reasons, are agreeable. This novella pays a lot of attention to how the staff of big houses used to celebrate Boxing Day.
 
Elizabeth Beacon recounts the strange tale of LORD GRANGE’S SNOWY REUNION. Lord Nathaniel Grange, the youngest hero at only twenty-four, has come home from campaigning to discover his country house was neither let nor cared for. A lot of work is required, but a young neighbour riding up through the falling snow with just her Dalmatian dog as an escort is clearly a priority. Most of this story has no other characters so it comes across as one long conversation.
 
If you want to prolong the festive season and get a glimpse of days gone by, both upstairs and downstairs, you can hardly do better than this trio of romances.  REGENCY CHRISTMAS WEDDINGS are all about decking the halls with greenery and celebrating the end of decades of war. No wonder everyone – almost everyone – ends up happy.