Rich, rugged-- royal

Rich, Rugged and Royal is a romance novel by the American writer Cynthia Rutledge, published in 2005 by Silhouette Books.

Lauren Carlyle is a schoolteacher, and the novel opens at a ball where she meets a man whose manners and bearing she cannot place and who turns out to be far more than the stranger she took him for. The two of them spend a night together and part, and then the book's complication arrives: the man is connected to the household or the institution she is about to become part of, so the separation she thought she had is not available. Rutledge writes for the category romance market, which means the book is short, the obstacle is emotional rather than practical for long, and the romance is conducted within the conventions of the line. The royal element is the reason for the secrecy and the reason the two of them cannot simply carry on as they began.

Silhouette and Harlequin published thousands of these titles, and the authors wrote to the requirements of the individual lines, which set the length, the heat level and the shape of the ending.