"A Bride Unveiled" by Jillian Hunter

Kit and Violet meet when they are young teens.  She's a sheltered, lonely miss living in a very small English town with her overprotective aunt and uncle.  He's an orphan at the local workhouse who escapes while he should be working to play in the old cemetery near Violet's house.  She sees him from her window and is fascinated.  Eventually, she and two local boys meet Kit at the cemetery where they have great adventures pretending to sword fight while looking for hidden treasure.  But right before Kit's 15th birthday, he's sold into servitude and leaves the area.  Violet is brokenhearted.

Ten years later, Violet and her now widowed aunt are in London where she's just become engaged to a boring but stable merchant.  They attend a party where there's a demonstration by the local fencing school, and the maitre d'armes is none other than Kit!  Once he and Violet discover each other, it's all they can do to keep their mutual feelings in check.

This was a light and breezy historical romance, the first that I've read by this author.  Her manner of writing dialog is very sparse, without much detail as the characters are talking.  But the story was unique, and both the hero and heroine were very likable and did not spend the entire book denying their feelings for each other, which was a nice change.  339 pages.