Devil in Winter

What's inside (9 sections)

1. The Least Romantic Proposal in London
2. Forty-Eight Hours to Gretna Green
3. Jenner's
4. The Bargain
5. The Shot
6. The Knife
7. What the Book Does and What It Does Not
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

Evangeline Jenner turns up at Sebastian St. Vincent's London house late at night, alone, with a small valise and a proposal. She has a stammer, a dying father, and relatives who have spent years teaching her to flinch. He has a title, a mountain of debt, and a reputation so wrecked that his best friend has just beaten him bloody for kidnapping that friend's fiancee. She asks him to marry her. He says yes before morning.

Avon published Devil in Winter in 2006. It is the third Wallflowers novel, 384 pages, and it opens right after the scandal in It Happened One Autumn. I expected the book to help me forget what Sebastian did there. Instead it is about a man who has never been useful to anyone learning, awkwardly, how to be useful to one person.

The Least Romantic Proposal in London

Sebastian's problems are simple and humiliating. His father, the duke, has run through the family money, and Sebastian has no profession, no savings, and no intention of acquiring either. He has always traded on his face and his title. Now the face is in a scandal, and the title comes with debts. He needs an heiress, and he is almost proud of how badly he behaves.

Evie's problems are worse. Her mother was a Maybrick and died giving birth to her. Her father, Ivo Jenner, built a gambling club from nothing and sent his daughter to live with her mother's people so she could be raised properly. The Maybricks spent two decades making her feel like an inconvenient piece of furniture. Her uncle Peregrine has hit her. Her cousin Eustace Stubbins, a coward who eats out of boredom, has been told to marry her so the family can keep her inheritance. Evie has three failed Seasons, a stammer, and no legal way to refuse.

So she goes to the one man in London with fewer options than she has. The scene works because Kleypas lets Evie be blunt. She does not plead. She lays out terms like a merchant: her fortune for his name and his protection. She wants to see her father before he dies. There will be no lovemaking after the wedding night, because she will not become another woman he tires of. He agrees because he is desperate and because she interests him. Evie negotiates.

They leave for Scotland that night.

Forty-Eight Hours to Gretna Green

The journey is the best sustained section of the book. Kleypas does not romanticize the elopement. The carriage is cold, the roads are bad, and Evie is exhausted and frightened. By the end of the forty-eight-hour trip she can barely stand. Sebastian, who has never had to take care of anyone, keeps doing small things without being asked. He finds a brick to warm her feet. He holds her against his shoulder when she cannot stay upright. None of it is a grand gesture. It is a man noticing that another person is cold.

Evie has spent her life being told she is plain and dull, so being noticed is its own kind of seduction.

At Gretna Green they find Paisley MacPhee, a blacksmith who performs anvil weddings. Evie picks a plain gold ring engraved with the Gaelic words Tha Gad Agam Ort, which MacPhee translates as "My love is upon ye." Outside, in the rain, Sebastian kisses her for the first time. He says he will wait until morning.

He does not wait long. Evie is asleep when he begins touching her. She wakes into it and responds. But the power in that room is all his, and the fact that she eventually enjoys it does not erase the fact that she did not choose the moment. Plenty of readers have called this a consent problem, and they are right to. Kleypas frames it as tenderness. It reads as a man helping himself to something he has been told he can have.

The morning after is better. Evie is sore, bewildered, and quietly furious with herself for wanting him again. She repeats her rule: no more. Sebastian, who has never been refused, takes it badly and points out that the law is on his side. She tells him to go ahead and force her, and he cannot. That is the first crack in his self-portrait. He is not the villain he pretended to be, and Evie is the first person to call his bluff.

Jenner's

They return to London and go straight to Jenner's, the gaming club. The place is in decay. Ivo is upstairs dying of consumption. At the door, a surly young man named Joss Bullard refuses Evie entry until Sebastian leans on him. Inside, the club's factotum, Clive Egan, has been helping himself to the accounts for years. Cam Rohan, a young Romani croupier, is the one person with any loyalty left.

The middle of the novel is a business story, which is unusual for a romance. Sebastian looks at the ledgers, spots the theft, dismisses Egan, and announces that he will run the club himself. He has no idea what he is doing. He learns that a gentleman cannot simply give orders in a place like this; he has to be seen to fight. When a brawl breaks out, he takes off his coat and wades in, and the men begin, grudgingly, to respect him. The redemption is not a speech. It is a series of shifts.

Evie sits with her father, feeds him broth, and listens to him. Ivo is a hard, unsentimental man who sent his daughter away and then could not understand why she stopped visiting. He dies with her at his bedside, after asking for Cam and telling Evie that Cam is not her brother, a strange moment.

Sebastian makes an angry gesture, and Evie flinches, covering her head. She has been beaten enough by Peregrine that her body reacts before her mind does. Sebastian is shaken. He promises he will never strike her, and for once he does not make a joke. Kleypas shows two kinds of shame at once: the shame of a woman who has been hit, and the shame of a man who has just realized how easily he could become the person who hits her.

The Bargain

The plot turns on a kidnapping. One Sunday, while Sebastian is out, Bullard tells Evie that her friend Annabelle is waiting at the back entrance. It is a lie. Peregrine and Brook are there, and Eustace is in the carriage. They drag Evie inside, and Eustace puts a forearm across her throat. Sebastian comes back in time, hauls the carriage door open, and threatens to kill Eustace if he does not let her go. It is the first time Sebastian chooses Evie over his own comfort.

Afterward, Evie accuses him of spending the afternoon with a prostitute. He is furious, and his denial turns into a graphic whisper about what he wants to do to her. She does not melt. She makes him a wager. If he can go three months without intercourse with anyone, she will come to his bed willingly, for as long as they both live. If he fails, he has to apologize to Lord Westcliff for abducting Lillian. She starts at six months. He talks her down to three.

The wager is the book's best invention. It is Evie finding the one thing Sebastian cannot buy or charm his way out of: time. She is asking him to prove he can be faithful before she gives him her body again. The forfeit is clever, too. Apologizing to Westcliff is the one act of humility that would cost him something real. He accepts, and when she takes off her wedding ring in a fit of pique, he slides it onto the tip of his smallest finger, where it will go no farther.

The long middle is the two of them circling each other inside the club. Annabelle brings mourning clothes and announces her pregnancy. Lillian and Westcliff visit, and Westcliff's kindness to Evie makes Sebastian jealous in a way he refuses to name. A running argument asks what the wager forbids, and Sebastian insists it only covers intercourse. Evie discovers that she can want him on her own terms.

The Shot

The club reopens, and Bullard comes back with a pistol. He climbs to the gallery and aims at Evie. Cam sees him first. Sebastian follows Cam's gaze, understands, and puts his body between the gun and his wife. The bullet goes through his side.

Sebastian, bleeding on the floor, asks Westcliff to protect Evie and apologizes for the kidnapping. It is the first apology of his adult life, and he makes it because he thinks he is dying. Evie finds her wedding ring on a chain around his neck. He had moved it there so he could keep it against his chest. It is a sentimental detail, and it works.

The wound festers. The doctor wants to bleed him, and Sebastian, delirious with fever, begs Evie not to allow it. She refuses the doctor, a brave choice for a woman with no medical training and no authority. Cam brings Romani remedies, including bog moss, and the four of them spend days irrigating the wound. The fever breaks.

During the recovery, Sebastian becomes a terrible patient, ringing the bell for Evie constantly because he wants her nearby. Evie ends the wager on her own terms. She seduces him in the sickbed, knowing he will lose the bet with her rather than with someone else. The woman who was supposed to be passive sets the terms, and the man who was supposed to be in control has to surrender.

The Knife

The villain is the weakest part of the plot. Westcliff traces the pistol to Egan, who talks. Bullard believed he was Ivo Jenner's unacknowledged son, and his jealousy of Evie curdled into murder as his mind deteriorated from syphilis. Egan says Bullard died in a hospital. He has not. He gets into the club through the hidden passage and confronts Evie in her bedroom with a knife. He is a dying man with a grievance.

Sebastian does not charge him. He talks to him. He offers medicine, a clean bed, and shelter, and as he speaks he moves slowly around the room, turning Bullard so Cam has a clear shot from the doorway. Cam fires. Bullard falls. Evie protests that he was lowering the knife. Cam says quietly that it was a mercy. The scene is short and grim.

The last conflict is not the villain. It is Sebastian trying to send Evie away because he cannot bear how much he needs her. He has decided that attachment is just the opening act of grief. Evie refuses to go. She tells him she loves him and lists the ordinary things she wants: to watch him shave, to share a bed, to mend his stockings, to have his children. He says he loves her so much that he feels like he is drowning. She does not let him drown alone.

The epilogue is almost aggressively domestic. It is the end of winter, and Annabelle and Lillian are both pregnant. Evie, asked whether Sebastian has reformed, smiles and says, "Just enough." It is a good last line because it does not claim too much. He is not a new man. He is a man who has decided to be better for one person, and that is all the book promises.

What the Book Does and What It Does Not

The case for Devil in Winter is easy. It has a heroine who is allowed to be shy without being stupid, and a hero whose redemption is measured in labor rather than declarations. The stammer is a daily humiliation rather than a cute flaw, and Kleypas shows how it shapes Evie's behavior: the way she avoids groups, rehearses sentences, uses silence as armor. Sebastian's vanity is a good comic engine, and the club gives the book a working-class texture.

The case against it is just as easy. The central bargain is coercive in a way the book never fully examines. Evie has no real alternatives. Sebastian has the title, the law, the money, and the physical power. She chooses him because the other choice is Eustace, and the novel treats that as agency when it is closer to a hostage exchange. The wedding night is the clearest example. She is asleep. He starts without asking. The prose wants us to read her response as consent, and many readers cannot, and should not have to.

Then there is the retcon. In the previous book, Sebastian kidnapped Lillian and threatened to rape her. In this one, Evie challenges him to force her, he cannot, and she concludes that he was only bluffing and that Lillian was never in danger. It is a convenient way to soften a character the author has already made too dark. It asks the reader to forgive a threat of sexual violence because the man turns out to have a conscience. The book does not earn that. It asserts it.

The plot outside the romance is thin. The club's financial troubles are resolved quickly. The villain appears late, explains himself in a burst of exposition, and is disposed of in a few pages. The middle section is a series of domestic and business vignettes rather than a story with its own momentum. Readers who need a strong external plot will feel the length.

There are also stereotypes that have not aged well. Cam is repeatedly called "the Gypsy," and his description leans on exotic terms: sloe eyes, golden skin, a mysterious stillness. He is one of the most likable characters in the book, and he is still written as a fantasy of Roma rather than a person. The club's Cockney staff are similarly broad. Eustace is fat, and the narration never misses a chance to tell us so, with jokes about his girth that are meant to be funny and mostly are not. The class politics are confused: the book celebrates work but also enjoys the fantasy of an aristocrat running a business better than the people who built it.

The fantasy at the center is just that, a fantasy. The rake does not reform because he sees the error of his ways. He reforms because the right woman loves him and because he finds a job. "Just enough," Evie says, and the wink is the whole thesis.

Who is it for? Readers who want a historical romance with a sharp, funny hero, a quiet heroine who grows a spine, and a lot of scenes of people taking care of each other. Readers who like their consent unambiguous, their villains motivated, and their ethnic descriptions free of period exoticism should stay away. Readers who cannot get past what Sebastian did in the previous book will not be won over by an apology that arrives only after he is shot.

I finished it in two sittings and understood why people press it into other people's hands. It is a very good version of a particular wish: that the person who has been careless with everyone else might be careful with you.

FAQ

Can I read Devil in Winter without the other Wallflowers books?

Yes, but it follows directly from It Happened One Autumn, where Sebastian kidnaps Lillian. Knowing that history makes his redemption more complicated.

Who are the Wallflowers?

They are four friends, Annabelle, Lillian, Evie, and Daisy, who help one another find husbands. Each novel centers on one of them.

Does Devil in Winter have a happy ending?

Yes. Sebastian and Evie stay together, the club thrives, and the epilogue shows their friends starting families.