Review: Lady Ashley Never Behaves (The Season of Secrets Book 4) by Bronwen Evans

                                                       

Print Length: 294 pages

Publisher: Dragonblade Publishing (May 28, 2026)

From Goodreads.com:  The ton called her a scandal. Her husband called her trouble. Irresistible trouble…

Lady Ashley Ware has spent three years as society’s cautionary tale, carefully rebuilding her reputation one quiet step at a time. But one moment of compassion—offering comfort to the grieving Duke of Blackstone in a moonlit garden—destroys everything she’s worked for when they’re caught in a compromising embrace.

Raven Perrin, Duke of Blackstone, lives by society’s rules. Proper, controlled, and utterly devoted to duty, he’s drowning in grief over losing the only woman he’s ever loved. The last thing he needs is to be trapped in marriage to a lady whose mere presence threatens his carefully ordered world.

Their marriage of convenience should be he provides protection and respectability, she provides…nothing he wants. But Ashley refuses to be ignored. Determined to claim the one thing that might bring purpose to her lonely existence—a child—she embarks on a scandalous plan to seduce her own husband.

But Raven has a secret—one he’s terrified Ashley will discover. Still, she’s determined to be a wife to Raven and manages to make some gains. Until her secret—the one she’s been keeping for three years—comes to light and almost destroys everything…

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My Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5

I really wanted to like this one because I’ve read other books by this author that I genuinely enjoyed, but unfortunately this one just didn’t work for me for a number of reasons.

The biggest issue was that Ashley and Raven spent far too much time trapped inside their own heads. And look, these characters should have been compelling. Raven is still grieving the woman he loved before Ashley and struggling with desires he believes would scandalize most “proper” women of the era, while Ashley is carrying the truth about the night she was ruined. There’s plenty of emotional conflict there to build on. The problem is that instead of those things creating tension and momentum, the story just circles the same thoughts over and over again. Raven constantly obsesses over his flaws and secrets, while Ashley spends much of the first half wondering why her husband refuses to touch her despite the fact that she can clearly tell he wants to. After a while, it started to feel repetitive rather than emotionally layered.

There were also a few technical issues that stood out enough to pull me out of the story. One that immediately caught my attention was Raven referring to his “Dominatrix needs.” Except… that’s not how that word works. A dominatrix specifically refers to a female dominant, so the phrasing made no sense in the context it was being used. Then there’s the masquerade scene, which honestly made me laugh a little because it completely defeated its own purpose. The entire setup is supposed to revolve around anonymity and the freedom of pretending to be someone else for the night, yet everyone somehow seems to know exactly who everyone else is despite the masks and costumes. At that point, why even bother calling it a masquerade ball?

And then we get to the thing that really gave me the ick: the relationship between a grown woman and a fifteen-year-old boy being framed in a way that felt far too dismissive of the age gap. I understand what the author was attempting to do narratively, and yes, I know historical standards were different during the Regency era, but I am begging authors to stop acting like fifteen-year-olds were magically adults just because society married younger back then. Having the older woman casually reflect that “fifteen is hardly a child” absolutely did not help matters. Because ma’am, fifteen is very much still a child.

By the end, I was hoping the payoff would redeem some of my frustrations once all the secrets finally came to light. And to an extent, it did improve things somewhat. The problem was that the emotional declarations between Ashley and Raven became so repetitive that instead of feeling romantic, they started feeling almost cringeworthy. They kept professing themselves over and over again, but never really saying anything new or meaningful beyond what had already been established.

That being said, this book hasn’t put me off the author entirely because I have enjoyed their work before. I’d absolutely read more from them in the future. Just… probably not more from this particular series.

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.