in the contemporary romance world, property always ends up going to two people, unrelated, who just HAVE to share the house/apartment/farm. there's just no way around it.
I loved this analysis. I know I've read more books with this plot, but was only able to remember a few. The late Jo Beverly wrote a lot of books with tricky legal shenanigans. "Secrets of the Night" has some plot similarities to "A Lady Awakened". The heroine's elderly husband is not able to father a child, so to thwart the horrible heir, she engineers what we would now call a 1-night stand. She meets the hero/sperm donor at a masquerade, he doesn't know her true identity, or that she's trying to use him to get pregnant.
Another Beverly book, "The Devil's Heiress" has a heroine who has fraudulently inherited a fortune, due to a forged will. It's part of her long-running Company of Rogues series. The forgery/inheritance plot is set in motion in Book 2, "An Unwilling Bride", but a lot of people find the content problematic, in that one and Book 1, "An Arranged Marriage". I won't get into the details, but you'll see quickly enough in the reviews what people hate about those two.
"A Feather To Fly With" by Joyce Harmon has monetary fraud(involving horse racing), not real property fraud, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's very delightful and funny, basically a found family of con artists.
"In the Arms of the Heiress" by Maggie Robinson and "The Vagabond Duchess" by Claire Thornton are not property fraud per se, but they are good books with fake marriage plots. In the Thornton book, a forged marriage license is produced after the fact.
in the contemporary romance world, property always ends up going to two people, unrelated, who just HAVE to share the house/apartment/farm. there's just no way around it.
I loved this analysis. I know I've read more books with this plot, but was only able to remember a few. The late Jo Beverly wrote a lot of books with tricky legal shenanigans. "Secrets of the Night" has some plot similarities to "A Lady Awakened". The heroine's elderly husband is not able to father a child, so to thwart the horrible heir, she engineers what we would now call a 1-night stand. She meets the hero/sperm donor at a masquerade, he doesn't know her true identity, or that she's trying to use him to get pregnant.
Another Beverly book, "The Devil's Heiress" has a heroine who has fraudulently inherited a fortune, due to a forged will. It's part of her long-running Company of Rogues series. The forgery/inheritance plot is set in motion in Book 2, "An Unwilling Bride", but a lot of people find the content problematic, in that one and Book 1, "An Arranged Marriage". I won't get into the details, but you'll see quickly enough in the reviews what people hate about those two.
"A Feather To Fly With" by Joyce Harmon has monetary fraud(involving horse racing), not real property fraud, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's very delightful and funny, basically a found family of con artists.
"In the Arms of the Heiress" by Maggie Robinson and "The Vagabond Duchess" by Claire Thornton are not property fraud per se, but they are good books with fake marriage plots. In the Thornton book, a forged marriage license is produced after the fact.