Aubrey Fanshawe, the second son of an earl, is happily in a long term relationship with Lord and Lady Herndale. Sure, he imagines he'll have to marry eventually, and sometimes it's lonely having to keep his part of their relationship secret, but he's mostly happy. One night at the theatre with them, he meets Lucien Saxby, and uncharacteristically takes him back to his own home before finding out that he's a gossip journalist. Of course Saxby has his own reasons for not wanting to spread that kind of gossip, but Fanshawe still wonders in the morning if he'd made a mistake to trust him. Then accusations are made that can only be fixed by Saxby being seen publicly as a friend of the Herndales, and he and Fanshawe discover that, as different as their worlds are, they can't ignore what they have together.
This was an impressively straight forward yet complex book. Yes, there's an issue that needs to be addressed that gives Saxby a reason to need to spend time in Fanshawe's social circle, but it's not a book with a lot of external plot, which is rare in the romances that I read. But the obstacles to Fanshawe and Saxby's relationship, although eventually surmountable, are believably difficult. Saxby was raised in service, and it takes a lot of work for him to learn to be comfortable on intimate terms with nobs, to realize when Fanshawe isn't judging him for his class but just being awkward, and for Fanshawe to learn what Saxby is and isn't willing to accept from him and to start thinking of working people in general as individuals with their own interests, not just Saxby.
The secondary characters are also well drawn. There's a nice subplot involving the women's suffrage movement that was part of the reason I was interested in this book. Saxby has a female coworker who wants out of the society pages whom I'd love to see more of in a future book. The only shortcoming that I might find with the book is that, in my estimation, some of the sex scenes rather dragged out, but others' mileage may vary there.
Overall: A-