A Dangerous Desire or McKay Makes a Match

[janne_d]

A Novel of Romance by a Lady

All Rodney McKay had thought he wanted was to be left alone with his theories and hypotheses. Being abducted and meeting the intriguing John Sheppard had put paid to that. Rodney understood his own desires rather better now, but society’s laws and conventions opposed him and Sheppard was surely far out of his reach. Not to mention the complication of his mysterious abductor…

A/N: My deepest gratitude to torakowalski for her invaluable assistance, enthusiasm and encouragement throughout. Inspired and influenced by Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Bernard Cornwell, Colin Firth’s wet shirt, Matthew MacFadyen’s breeches and far too many Mills and Boon Regency Romances read as a teenager. Plot structure freely adapted from “Fair Juno” by Stephanie Laurens.
Caveat: Although research was perpetrated, no claims are made to historical accuracy. All mistakes are my own.

Index

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six and Epilogue

Comments

[janne-d.livejournal.com]

It felt realistic to me, because I think a lot of them would have done just that - struck out for the colonies, where social strictures could be circumvented more easily.

That's exactly why I had them go to the Colonies at the end - I just couldn't see any other way for it to work as a really happy ending. If they'd stayed in England there would have had to be this edge of risk and restriction and... doom lingering and I really didn't want that for my little romance.

So uranian was from the 1860s? I was only 40 years early then... just another example of Rodney being ahead of his time! :-) I suspect that the reference I found (which I unfortunately didn't bookmark) simply said it was 19th century, it didn't seem pejorative and it implied education from being Plato so I went with it. It's cool to find out more about it (the research for this was always interesting) and I'm glad it didn't throw you out of the story from being a bit wonky historically. I did wish I knew more factual history when I was writing this - really, most of the details come from memories of novels and whatever I could check up on the internet so I just had to cross my fingers I was getting some of it right! Especially since I've read regency AUs where I've picked up that things were factually and culturally wrong and had to stop reading them in irritation - I didn't want to do that to anyone with mine.