Suddenly

Suddenly is a historical romance by Candace Camp, published by Mira in 1996. It belongs to a large body of English-set romances in which a marriage is negotiated as carefully as a treaty.

Simon Dure, known to his friends as Devil, has no illusions left about love, and Charity Emerson has not yet acquired any. She is certain she can meet his requirements for a wife, and he finds her certainty diverting enough to test. Their engagement is as much a conspiracy as a courtship, and it gives Charity room for the schemes and the warm laughter that begin to work on a man who has kept his own feelings locked away for years. Then a murder puts the pair of them inside an investigation, and the courage they have been showing each other is tested in earnest.

Camp writes a romance in which the couple are partners as well as lovers, so the mystery runs alongside the courtship rather than interrupting it. Charity is the one who does the persuading for most of the book, and the arrangement she talks her way into is the reason both of them are in place when the trouble arrives.