An Honorable Love (The Gentlemen's Gamble, # ?)
By: Audra Wells
Expected Publication: March 19, 2026
244 pages
Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction
Source: Personal Kindle Library
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Goodreads description--One grump. One thief. One highly-questionable adventure.Leonard Stanton has perfected the art of being alone. He keeps to the edges of ballrooms, and society, whenever possible. But when a priceless family heirloom is stolen off his very person, he finds himself dragged into the one thing he hates most—a social entanglement.
Enter Miss Honora Gillingham. Vexingly cheerful, utterly unpredictable, and the last person Leonard should trust. Mostly because . . . she’s the one who stole from him.
Sigh, I'm a little sad about An Honorable Love. I can't say that I loved this book out of the A Gentleman's Gamble series. This series has been such a fun reading journey. I've seen independent historical fiction authors pile together to create these "series" where the characters or themes are connected, and each book is written by a different author. I think it's a great way to introduce readers of one author to similar authors they may be unfamiliar with. That certainly happened with me and this series. At the same time, I just didn't feel like An Honorable Love meshed with the other books in this series as much as I wanted it to.
Leonard is the last of his friends to marry. Or at least, he is unmarried at the start of this book. And that means that he has to pay the forfeit to the other friends for a total of six hundred pounds. He has the money, but his investments are tied up, and it isn't wise to pull them at this time. Yet he wants so badly to pay off his friends that he's willing to sell his great-grandmother's ring to do so. Unfortunately, he gets pickpocketed by a woman.
Honora didn't grow up wealthy. As a matter of fact, her father was a thief. And she has no friends in her new life. Well, she has one, but that friend hasn't contacted her in a while. And now she's bored. She's tried conversing with her maid, but the maid is terrified of stepping outside of her duties. And so she sets her sights on Leonard because he's so fun to rile up. She didn't mean for them to have any repeat interactions after pocketing his great-grandmother's ring. But the man did manage to track her down. Honora uses Leonard in a series of quests to complete a final task and put her thieving days behind her once and for all. Only these two are catching feelings.
Honora's past and entanglements make this book feel almost like a mystery, yet the mystery element is lacking. The only real mystery is the truth behind her past. But that isn't revealed in some big climax, but over a series of slow drips of information for both the reader and Leonard. I could feel the attraction between the two of them, but to get all the way to love felt like a stretch.
In a similar way, it was like Leonard was so against marriage and tying anyone to his father and his family, yet that didn't turn out to be any big obstacle in the end, and his father didn't even seem like an unreasonable man either. It was almost like he was made out to be some big villain, even potentially abusive to his son, yet none of that ended up coming out. I wasn't disappointed to find out that he was a decent person, but it felt a little bit anticlimatic.
In the end, An Honorable Love was probably my least favorite in the The Gentleman's Gamble series. I've decided to give it 3 Stars. I almost thought Thomas was going to show up in the end single after starting the whole thing, considering we never met him in person aside from the prologue of all of the books. That would have been something. Have you read An Honorable Love? What did you think? Let me know!
