I found this book immensely frustrating for all the reasons you list - there's Gothic, there's romance, and there's Gothic Romance, and I feel like Rose Lerner eschewed the very obvious third option and opted to try and blend the first two instead, and it . . . doesn't work. It doesn't work as a romance, because I never really bought that Deborah and Jael were fulfilled by each other - they were partners of lust and convenience, but it didn't stretch much further - and it didn't work as a Gothic because it had the requisite romance HEA which didn't map onto the existing setup at all. Just a very strange read overall. (Also, perhaps this is a relatively minor nitpick, but: this book is set in the mid-1810s, would Deborah's grandmother really have been of an age to be tortured in the Inquisition? I know they were around into the early 1700s, but that's still a jump, and I don't think they were nearly as active at that point.)