A review by authorcagray
Something in the Heir by Suzanne Enoch

This started off intriguing - a pair of friends marries so that Emmaline can keep her family estate, but her now husband Will is secretly in love with her. As part of the requirement to keep the estate, her grandfather requires that they have children within the first 5 yrs of marriage (which does seem a little contrived, but I can go with it.) I don't know why Emmaline is therefore quite so shocked and put off when Will attempts to consummate the marriage--seems like she should have known how all this worked--but after 7 months of trying (I gather as little as possible), when Emmaline doesn't conceive, she's relieved to declare she is infertile and they can stop now. But, Emma invents two children in writing, to make her grandfather believe they've fulfilled her terms. (Why she thinks this will never be discovered, I'm not sure...) Eight years later, though, her grandfather is throwing himself a birthday party and wants to meet the kids. So Emma has to confess to Will, now all but a stranger given how the marriage has gone, that she lied about their offspring. She contrives to find two stand-in children who can pass for theirs, and they end up going to an orphanage to collect some who fit her description.

I thought this was going to be a sweet story that focuses on how Emma falls in love with her husband many years later, and it probably will become that at the end... but once the orphans enter the picture, the story suddenly becomes almost entirely about them, their street life, and then their older brother... it just seems to get further and further away from what seemed to be the story's original direction. Eventually I gave up.