Samantha Northrup is a woman alone. She is the daughter of a country vicar who passed away a year ago, she has no prospects and she has to find another place to live. Samantha lives quietly alone, using her skills with herbs and healing among the village's inhabitants until one night a stranger shows up and demands the keys to the Aylesborough family vault. The stranger falls ill and there is no one else to tend him but her, and soon she finds herself married to a complete stranger whose identity is somewhat in question.

As the son of a wealthy duke, Yale Carderock lived a profligate, reckless life that landed him in hot water with his father, who was so perturbed by his son's actions that he disinherited him to teach him a lesson. Now a man grown, Yale returns to toss his success in his father's face, only to find him long dead. After Yale is felled by an illness, he is nursed back to health by the lovely Samantha, only to be caught in the parson's mousetrap of marriage and reunited with his family. Can Yale get beyond the bitterness of his misspent youth and learn to appreciate the wife he has acquired so that their hastily arranged marriage becomes something more?

Because of You is a story of a bad boy making his way back home after a long period of being the prodigal son. I enjoyed Yale's growth of character and his fierce spirit. Samantha was a bit harder for me to like, as she seemed to be a bit of an opportunist, but she grew on me as the story progressed. The passion between these two was authentic and tangible. The premise of the story worked better in the second half of the book, perhaps because the characters were more fleshed out at that point. It just seemed to flow differently in the latter parts of the book; the beginning lacked ease of flow. It seemed somewhat choppy at times. I felt that the author did a good job of resolving the major conflict of the book and that the settings and secondary characters were appropriate. Ms. Maxwell excels at writing family conflicts and resolving them in interesting ways, and this story is a perfect example of that. Four Angels.

Reviewed by: Michelle B.