"Silent Melody" by Mary Balogh

Silent Melody by Mary Balogh 1997

Description from back of book:
"Lady Emily Marlowe was beautiful, wild, and unspoiled. She could not hear or speak, though she listened with her eyes and answered with her smile. She was betrothed to a man who would have her as a pretty possession, a captive listener. But there was only one man for her - the dark and reckless Lord Ashley Kendrick, the childhood amour who inspired her fantasies - then left for India and found another love. Seven years and countless dreams later, he returned to her, and love was born with a dance, a minuet that stirred her soul, a song so passionate it had no words..."

First off, this book is Georgian, not Regency, but I'm including it here because Mary Balogh is, for the most part, a Regency writer. This book is also the sequel to "Heartless." I truly enjoyed this book. I wasn't sure at first whether having a deaf-mute heroine would even work - it sounds difficult to transfer facial expressions, etc, into words in a book, but Mary Balogh succeeds in doing so, and in making Emily a warm and complex character. Ashley, on the other hand, is a tortured and hurting man, filled with guilt over the accidental deaths of his wife and son in India. In Emily he finds the comfort of a long friendship, and with the realization that she is a woman, and not a little girl, he finds the hope of a great deal more. This book has more of a plot than many of Mary Balogh's books, and it's a good plot that unravels at a reasonable pace - it's not thrown at you, but it doesn't slow down the book either. Truly an enjoyable work!

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