My Only Love

My Only Love is a 1993 historical romance by Katherine Sutcliffe, published by Jove.

The arrangement is financial. Miles Warwick needs money and marries Olivia Devonshire for it, and her reputation is the reason he can obtain her at all, since she is described as notorious and secretive. The novel's method is to let both parties enter the marriage for reasons of their own and then spend the book undoing those calculations, which is the shape the genre used constantly in this period.

The label bodice-ripper was applied to the historical romances of the 1970s and 1980s with their dominant heroes and resistant heroines, and by the early 1990s the market had shifted towards the more explicit and more mutual form that this book represents. Jove published both kinds in paperback on the same lists. Their ages are given as twenty-seven and thirty-nine, and the difference in standing is what allows the marriage to be proposed at all, since a woman with a notorious past is available on terms a respectable match would not permit. It is the second book of the Warwick Brothers sequence.