Stranger in My Arms

Stranger in My Arms is a historical romance by the American writer Lisa Kleypas, published by Avon Books in 1998. Its central situation is a marriage that is over, or is supposed to be, and a man who returns to it.

Lara's husband, Hunter, the Earl of Hawksworth, was reported lost at sea, and the years of their marriage had given her little to mourn: the affection in it was formal, the vows barely observed and the house a set of rooms she moved through alone. Into that settled widowhood comes a man who says he is Hunter, returned from wherever he had been, and he knows things about their marriage that only her husband could have known. He is stronger and more confident than the man she married, which is the first thing that makes her doubt him, and the fact that she wants to believe him is the second. The book follows the two of them as the household adjusts to his presence and Lara works out whether she is being deceived by a stranger or given a second version of a marriage she never got to have.

Kleypas wrote the novel in the register of the nineteenth-century English romance, with inheritance, scandal and the opinions of the neighbourhood all weighing on a private question.