I just finished rereading one of my favorite books of all time, Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh. There are a lot of reasons I love this book—it’s the culmination of a series, this one about the Bedwyn family, and it concerns the romance of the bull goose Bedwyn, Wulfric, Duke of Bewcastle. Wulf falls in love with a woman who’s totally wrong for him—wrong class, wrong temperament, wrong age, etc. But one of the things that makes this book work so well is that it’s a rare story where the “he-won’t-say-he-loves-me” trope actually works.

You know the trope I mean, of course. It’s the plot where the heroine works herself into a lather because the hero won’t tell her he loves her. If it’s a Regency romance, the heroine sometimes refuses to marry the hero until she’s somehow assured of his love, preferably by some high-flown announcement of the same.

The reason I frequently find this plot so annoying is that it doesn’t take into account the way most people think: we look at actions rather than words. If a politician tells me he just loves little kiddies and that children are the future, etc. and then cuts education funding to the bone and beyond, I’m going to assume he’s a liar and a hypocrite. Similarly, if a hero is stalwart and true, treating the heroine with affection, respect and passion, what the hell does it matter whether he says he loves her or not? Only an idiot would assume he doesn’t.

But in Slightly Dangerous you’ve got real doubts about Wulf’s feelings when he first proposes to the heroine. Sure, she’s a terrific woman, but he’s a very flawed man. The first time he proposes, she rejects him, and you feel that she’s made absolutely the right choice.

The rest of the book is devoted to bringing these two very different people together, and it’s an enjoyable ride. Through the other five Bedwyn books you see Wulf develop and you know he’s a decent, albeit arrogant man. But he’s seldom shown much humanity, the quality he has to have in order to win Christine. At the same time, you’ve seen Christine’s justified dislike of aristocratic society and you know that overcoming it is going to be a major hurdle. Since this is a romance, there’s never any doubt Wulf will become the man Christine wants him to be or Christine will find a way to become the kind of duchess Wulf needs, but the fun comes in seeing how Balogh works the whole thing out.

I guess what it comes down to is that the heroine’s he-won’t-say-he-loves-me fetish needs to be justified and that justifying that trope is often tricky. Balogh manages it by making the question crucial to the denouement of the story. The heroine isn’t being a dingbat here. What she’s asking for is central to the couple’s future happiness.

And that, I’d suggest, is rare indeed.