Search Results for: tessa dare

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How the Dukes Stole Christmas (CBR16 #3)

I had this collection picked out as my Christmas romance read a full year in advance. Then, I promptly didn’t read it, because that is how 2023 went. (Eventually my 2024 reviews will start without a lament about 2023, but this one isn’t it.) I love Tessa Dare books, particularly when I’m looking for something sweet and lighthearted. When checking her catalogue for a new to me book this past year I spotted this anthology from 2018 and put it on my list, zero questions asked.  

Meet Me in Mayfair by Tessa Dare 

Dare plays with some of the plot points of Meet Me in St. Louis, but this is its own story. Louisa Ward needs a Christmas miracle. She and her family have until new years to find a way to pay off a debt to the new Duke of Thorndale or they will have to leave the only home they’ve ever known. Her plan is to catch a suitor at her friend’s ball – only to be dragooned into taking her dance card so she can elope with the man she loves. Unfortunately, the card is chock full of unmarriageable men since Fiona had studiously been trying to not attract any other men’s attentions. The waltz is none other than Fiona’s distant cousin James, the Duke of Thorndale. Through a series of events and mostly truths Louisa and James spend the night getting to know each other around Mayfair, but can their newly blooming attraction and affection mean anything with all that hangs in the balance?  

I appreciated that Louisa is the one to change her mind, to grasp that while his decisions may be a bit shortsighted, James is making choices for the benefit of the people he is responsible for, forgetting that he is perhaps also responsible for the people who live and work in the properties he is preparing to sell. I also love that James isn’t afraid to re-evaluate with new information, while also not pretending to be someone he isn’t, or pretending that he doesn’t have the fears and worries he does. A really sweet story with steam primarily at the end.  

The Duke of Christmas Present by Sarah MacLean 

What if Belle had returned to Ebenezer Scrooge and given him the chance to reflect on his past and make a different choice before marrying another instead of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future finding him later in life? That’s what Sarah MacLean is playing with in The Duke of Christmas Present. Jacqueline and Eben had been in love, but the pressures of saving his estates after his drunken father’s death made Eben pull away, always wanting to prove he was good enough. Jack pulls away eventually leaving him to travel with her aunt. The Duke of Christmas Present moves between the, ahem, present and the past letting the reader in on what happened 12 years ago and seeing if Eben and Jack can figure it out this time. It was a little more angsty than you might traditionally find in a holiday read (in that way it reminded me of my other second chance holiday read For Never & Always) but it worked for me, especially the grovel.   

Heiress Alone by Sophie Jordan 

If The Duke of Christmas Present was a look at The Christmas Carol if Scrooge had gotten his life sorted before becoming a big old, well, Scrooge than Heiress Alone is Home Alone but if the family member forgotten was an English heiress in the Scottish Highlands with brigands on the loose breaking into houses and estates. A snowstorm is ensured to block the pass meaning that Annis Bannister won’t be able to be retrieved by her apparently easily distractable family and she is trapped for the next three months in the Highlands. Her first night after being left the neighboring Duke (whom her family embarrassed themselves in front of rather spectacularly) arrives to rescue the servants from the marauding thieves thinking that they’re alone. Alas, he also has an heiress to look after. About half of the story is their journey back to his estate, and then the second half focuses on their time together as they deal with their emotions. I liked this one a lot more than I was expecting to, especially how the physical attraction is balanced with their emotional inner lives.  

Christmas in Central Park by Joanna Shupe 

A retelling of Christmas in Connecticut should absolutely have been my favorite of the bunch since the 1945 movie is one of my all-time favorites. From Goodreads: “Mrs. Rose Walker pens a popular advice/recipe column. No one knows Rose can’t even boil water. When her boss, Duke Havemeyer, insists she host a Christmas party, Rose must find a husband, an empty mansion, and a cook. But Rose fears her plan is failing—especially when Duke’s attentions make her want to step under the mistletoe with him.” See? Should’ve been like catnip for me. But… i struggled to sink into this one. I’m sure plenty of others loved it.  

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Do You Want to Start a Scandal (CBR14 #13)

Do You Want to Start a Scandal (Spindle Cove, #5; Castles Ever After, #4)

I had a good time with Do You Want to Start a Scandal, primarily because it does one of my favorite things by putting a good deal of emotional intelligence into a character who may not be expected to have it and then let them deduce the world around them. It is deployed to good use as Charlotte Highwood goes head-to-head with Diplomat turned Spy Piers Brandon, Lord Granville after they are caught together during the Parkhurst ball but are not in fact the couple who had a tryst in that very room.

Charlotte is determined to discover who really had the tryst in the library to avoid a loveless marriage to Piers as Charlotte is now supposed to call him, has done the honorable thing… but Charlotte doesn’t want that – it will only support the rumors following her time in London for the season and there is no way this would be a love match. In fact, Piers has assured her that he will never love anyone, including her. As the two weeks of the stay at the Parkhurst estate play out Charlotte chases her clues and while she strikes out on finding the lovers, she does discover there is more to Piers than one might expect of a stuffy diplomat. Charlotte unravels the mystery of Piers while he just unravels, unable to complete the task he was sent to the Parkhurst estate for in the first place because Charlotte throws off all his skills by becoming the primary focus of all his attentions. The quiet moments between the pair as she puts the pieces together and he cannot fathom how she has become the only person to get the truth out of him in years were great.

This is technically a Spindle Cove novel – Charlotte is the youngest Highwood, her sisters Minerva featured in the earlier Spindle Cove book A Week to Be Wicked and Diana (who features in Beauty and the Blacksmith which I haven’t read) but it is never there, instead all action takes place at Parkhurst estate. Its also tangentially a Castles Ever After book, as Piers is the Marquess whom Clio breaks off her engagement with and marries her brother instead in Say Yes to the Marquess (I loved, love, loved the scene between Rafe and Charlotte in this!). Do You Want to Start a Scandal does show some of Dare’s usual go to tropes and structures, a Marriage of Convenience plot, smolder and steamy sexy times, sincere emotion on display, an emotionally wounded Hero who is smitten with the heroine area all on display here but what made this one stand out to me was that it is essentially a romance novel with mystery plot at its heart, something that I think I’d really like to read more of.  Purportedly there’s also humor in this one, but the “MURDER!” plot moppet enraged me instead of making me laugh, so I’ll have to take others’ word for it. Tessa Dare has a lively way of telling romance stories that is uniquely her, and it continues to make me happy to settle in and read her books.  

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A Lady by Midnight (CBR14 #4)

A Lady by Midnight (Spindle Cove, #3)

I can always trust Tessa Dare to bust a slump, and as exhaustion is one of my last remaining COVID symptoms, I’m not so much slumped as I am distractable. A Lady by Midnight took care of it either way, and I enjoyed my evening with it so much that I’m rating it five stars, and I know that I am one of the few around Cannonball Read to do so. I get it, but I’m also keeping my rating as is.

I am currently working my way through a large non-fiction tome where the author seems to be taking themselves a bit too seriously (Clement Knox’s Seduction review forthcoming eventually) and yesterday I just could not focus on it at all, and as it was a section on Casanova, I thought it best to just put it down and pick something else up. Lucky for present me, past me had ordered A Lady by Midnight before American Thanksgiving but the crush of books that needed reading in December in order to fulfill my reading challenges pushed it right off my to read pile for the month. But there it was calling to me from atop my bookcase.

It had been almost four years since my last time to Spindle Cove with A Week to be Wicked, but it mostly came back to me – certainly the town and its residents broadly if not the particulars of the books I had already read in the series (including A Night to Surrender and Any Duchess Will Do). I did remember though the two leads, who were introduced in the first novel and have been floating around in the periphery of the stories since. Kate Taylor is the town’s music instructor, she’s also an orphan who has been making her own way in the world since she was brought to a foundling school around age five. She’s managed to maintain an inner spark, and Spindle Cove as provided her with safety and friends, but she is still in search of family, and love. She’s certainly not expecting to find either of those things in Corporal Thorne, the militia commander in charge at Spindle Cove who arrived the year before and has seemingly made it his mission to ignore her at every turn. Thorne however has his own reasons for acting as he has, and with a family of aristocrats arriving claiming that Kate is their long-lost cousin he finds himself announcing that he is her fiancé, in order to keep her safe. It however complicates things tremendously.

Dare sticks with the things in her writing that I appreciate the most, this book has most of her standard features: in Kate we have an independent lady making her way in the world, the plot pretty closely aligns to a Marriage of Convenience, focusing on an engagement of convenience, the smolder and steamy sexy times are present (even if we’re about 2/3rds of the way through the book before Kate and Thorne get past kissing, there’s a lot happening in this story), sincere emotions are on display – specifically in actions, and Thorne might be her most wounded hero. These is a lot of heaviness to the plot of this one, but as its Tessa Dare it was also silly at time, funny, and sexy, which is what I am looking for when I pick up on of her books. Once all the pieces are on the board the narrative takes off and never really slows down, right through to the epilogue (and I really would have loved another chapter between the end and the epilogue). This one  is all about love, the shapes it takes, the ways we express it (or don’t), where we look for it… and it worked for me even when it shouldn’t have.

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Read Women 2020

Another book challenge, another victim of 2020. Like the other challenge I attempt each year, Read Harder, I did as well as I could and any books I read moving forward that complete a task will be added as the point at the end of the day is to read diversely and grow our habits and there’s no better way then to just keep trying.

All books read for this challenge must be by or about women.

  1. A Book by an Author from the Caribbean or India
  2. A Book Translated from an Asian Language
  3. A Book about the Environment
  4. A Picture Book Written/Illustrated by a BIPOC Author
    • The Proudest Blue by Ibtihaj Muhammad (TBR)
    • BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. For more information on the acronym, visit thebipocproject.org.
  5. A Winner of the Stella Prize or the Women’s Prize for Fiction
  6. A Nonfiction Title by a Woman Historian
  7. A Book Featuring Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism
  8. An Anthology by Multiple Authors
  9. A Book Inspired by Folklore
  10. A Book about a Woman Artist
  11. Read and Watch a Book-to-Movie Adaptation
  12. A Book about a Woman Who Inspires You
  13. A Book by an Arab Woman
  14. A Book Set in Japan or by a Japanese Author
  15. A Biography
  16. A Book Featuring a Woman with a Disability
  17. A Book Over 500 Pages
  18. A Book Under 100 Pages
  19. A Book That’s Frequently Recommended to You
  20. A Feel-Good or Happy Book
  21. A Book about Food
    • The Irish Pub Cookbook by Margaret M. Johnson, photographs by Leigh Beisch (2021)
    • Both cookbooks and food writing work for this challenge.
  22. A Book by Either a Favorite or a New-to-You Publisher
  23. A Book by an LGBTQ+ Author
  24. A Book from the 2019 Reading Women Award Shortlists or Honorable Mentions

BONUS

  • A Book by Isabel Allende – Eva Luna (2021)

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The Wallflower Wager (CBR12 #3)

The Wallflower Wager (Girl Meets Duke, #3)

This was not the book I was going to read next, but after the bummer of Royal Holiday I knew I needed a sure thing and a Tessa Dare book will always be a book that I quite enjoy. I pulled up the one I’d been saving, book three in the Girl Meets Duke series, and spent the afternoon and evening absorbed in Dare’s kooky version of Regency England. I love a fun, feminist, anachronistic romance novel and that is something that Tessa Dare delivers regularly.

The Wallflower Wager is good. Its easily four stars possibly sneaking into four and a half star good (although I still think the first in the series The Duchess Deal is my favorite of these books, but only a reread would tell me for sure). The Wallflower Wager focuses on Lady Penelope Campion and Gabriel Duke, known around the ton as the Duke of Ruin for the way he has amassed his fortune. Penelope has spent the best part of ten years as a reclusive wallflower, but the impending arrival of her brother to return her to the family estate – a place she firmly does not want to return to – causes her to strike a deal (or a wager as Aunt Caroline puts it) that she will make a concerted effort to get out there into society in an attempt to get Aunt Caroline to side with her so she may remain living on her own in the city. Gabriel is renovating the house next door in order to resell it at a large profit but part of his profit margin requires the presence of a Lady as a neighbor. He decides to help Penny live up to her portion of the wager, for his own reasons, but their physical attraction to each other keeps rearing its ugly head into their plans.

Dare’s cleverness in wordplay and character development, and a bit of poking at modern social commentary are on full display. The interactions between Penny and Gabriel as they begin and continue their sexual relationship are focused on consent and equity. Dare also delivers on sincere emotion and great emotional chemistry. What I appreciated most about this pairing is that Gabriel was concerned with not letting Penny be ruined, not because he thought it mattered, but that he knew it mattered to the society she was a part of, he had made a rule for himself years before to never ruin a woman and this was a believable component of the way they negotiate their growing relationship, particularly as it grows from lust to love.

Blessedly there is no instalove, instead we follow along with two people in lust with one another who act on it. As they continue to spend time together both in and out of bed their deeper emotions build, and they grow to know each other for who they are at their core. Gabriel always sees Penny’s courage and strength, even when her friends who love her dearly infantilize and underestimate her. Gabriel treats her like an intelligent, adult woman who should take charge of her own life and puts his actions where his words are. Until he has an alpha meltdown in the final part of the book, but even as the reader you are with him as he takes on Penny’s abuser (this book does come with a content advisory for heroine with a history of child sexual abuse, confronting her abuser, and a hero with a history of abandonment and extreme poverty in childhood).

Even with the heaviness that the content advisory is covering, there’s still Dare’s patented humor and ridiculous pets here. One of which is goat whom Penny swears is not pregnant (she’s not that kind of girl) and Gabriel is proven right in a particularly amusing scene involving all three very manly heroes from the series trying to figure out what to do when faced with a goat in labor.

This book also expertly weaves in the fourth and final installment’s introduction as Nicola spots her fiancé that none of her friends knew about at the ball at the end, and the epilogue refers to her married with children. Book four The Bride Bet is set to publish this summer and I’m looking forward to it immensely.

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Reading Women Challenge 2018

I started this challenge late in the year – a test to myself to see if what I had already read could fill in the categories. I did okay, but could not complete the challenge. I’ve left it open for myself and continued to fill in books that complete the tasks as I read them. Any book read in another year is marked as such.

  1. A book by a woman in translation
  2. A fantasy book written by a woman of color
  3. A book set in the American South
  4. A short story collection
  5. A graphic novel or memoir
  6. A book published by an independent press
  7. A book set in Russia or with a Russian author
  8. A book with  viewpoint character who is a immigrant or a refugee
  9. A book by an Australian or Canadian author
  10. An essay collection
  11. A book about someone with a chronic illness
  12. A true crime book
  13. A book by an African American woman about civil rights
  14. A classic novel written by a woman
  15. A poetry collection
  16. A book where the characters are travelling somewhere
  17. A book with a food item in the title
  18. A book written by a female Nobel Prize winner
    • Voices from Chernobyl (2015 Nobel Laureate)
  19. A book from the reading women award 2017 shortlist
  20. A memoir by someone who lives in a different country than you
  21. A book inspired by a fairytale
  22. A book by a local author or recommended at your local bookstore
  23. Book on your TBR the longest
  24. A book in a genre you have never read
  25. A book by Virginia Woolf (bonus)
  26. A book by Flannery O’Connor (bonus)

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The Governess Game (CBR10 #46)

Image result for the governess game girl meets duke

I love a fun, feminist, anachronistic romance novel and that is something that Tessa Dare delivers regularly. Dare writes what I fondly refer to as Historical Fantasy Romance. There is *some* historically accurate details running through her narrative but they are very thin and often bent to suit her plot needs. In the second outing in the Girl Meets Duke series we’re following Alex Mountbatten, introduced in The Duchess Deal, who makes her living by setting clocks to Greenwich Mean Time. Following a terrible, and hysterically inappropriate interview for a governess position she doesn’t realize she’s being interviewed for, Alex loses the chronometer that is her livelihood. With literally no way to make her living she returns to the home of Chase Reynaud and takes the governess position after all. Chase Reynaud is heir presumptive to his uncle’s Dukedom as well as the guardian of two little girls, and a renowned rake who wants none of the responsibility of any of it.

With that starting point we’re off on a classic Dare story. Readers who don’t enjoy her works usually either don’t like the anachronisms or find her structure too repetitive. I don’t have problems with either of those things, and in reality read her books for exactly those things. I like knowing what to expect and Dare’s writing breaks down into a pretty clear set of standards. We’ve already covered the first, Alex Mountbatten is absolutely an independent lady making her own way in the world, in fact, Dare sets her up to have had no other option since the age of 10.

While Dare tends to specialize in a Marriage of Convenience plot, this book plays on the motif by having the characters living under the same roof as employer and governess. Chase is the Wounded Hero to Alex’s Independent Lady, emotionally stunted by events in his past who is nevertheless smitten with the heroine. The being smitten leads to smolder and steamy sexy times, and because Dare is writing in a more and more feminist way Chase focuses on consent in his interactions with Alex. Dare also delivers on sincere emotion and great emotional chemistry. While Chase’s emotional withholding worked less well for me than Alex’s very realistic fears there was never a false note in their emotional interactions.

The other two common aspects of a Dare novel are interesting, but not overtaking, side characters and an infusion of comedy or whimsy in some regard. Dare is not afraid of humor and in The Governess Game it is the two characters of the little girls where this strength is used. Children can devolve to plot moppets very easily in Romance, but Dare manages to write believable children who are never twee and rooted in the emotional landscape of their experiences. They are also the stage for the laugh out loud moments in the story: the morning burials of Millicent the doll who dies each day (sometimes more than once per day) from some terrible disease and is buried in the toy box following a eulogy from Chase.

I read the book in one afternoon/evening taking only a few breaks. I did not want to leave these characters even while a headache was developing. There was perhaps one too many will they/won’t they back and forths, but the characters we are introduced to, the characters we see again, and the direction we’re headed for book three next year all worked for me in just the way I hoped they would when I purchased the book.

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read where we read what we want, review them how we see fit (within a few guidelines), and raise money in the name of a fallen friend for the American Cancer Society.

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Making Up (CBR10 #23)

Making Up (London Celebrities, #3)

CBR10 is my seventh year participating in Cannonball Read, and in that time I feel comfortable saying that I’ve made a space for myself as a reviewer of romance books. I review all the romance I read because I believe firmly that everyone should read what they want, read what they like, and have someone pointing the way for them. We have our lead dogs of this pack (#BlameMalin) and we have the “hobbyists” (me). One of the greatest gifts of Cannonball Read is finding new authors whom you love, and whose work you find consistently enjoyable. For me those are absolutely Rainbow Rowell, Courtney Milan, and Lucy Parker (which doesn’t even begin to cover the backlog of other authors that have been sent my way – my love for all things Tessa Dare only grows).

It is hard to believe that it was only two years ago that Lucy Parker blasted onto the Cannonball scene with Act Like It which was universally well received and then followed up the next year with Pretty Face which secured that the first book was not an anomaly, Lucy Parker can write. Having avoided the sophomore slump, I was still worried – could she maintain the high quality contemporary romances set in London’s theatre scene to complete the trilogy? Mostly yes is the good news here.

Making Up is two parts second chance romance and one part enemies to lovers. As in her previous books Lucy Parker handles the circumstance with a deft touch, tweaking the tropes to suit a relatable and believable history (even if it’s a bit of a retcon from what we saw in Pretty Face). Our main couple of Trix and Leo are adults and are (blessedly) capable of having adult conversations of substance with one another even in the early part of the book where they are still in the enemies phase. Parker wisely sets Trix and Leo’s Great Misunderstanding with their teenaged selves, a decade in their past, where it feels appropriate. The pair overcomes the misunderstanding between them fairly early in the novel which leads to a lot of funky baseline, but also a good deal of time for the characters to unpack the actual emotional baggage still on the table. Trix is still dealing with the fallout from her emotionally abusive ex, and is experiencing anxiety attacks  about everything, but especially a new, intense relationship. While Trix is the main thrust, Leo is also dealing with putting his relationship with his sister back on an even footing and repairing his professional standing, which is how he ends up working on Trix’s show in the first place.

Parker uses her setting, the West End theater scene, to provide her a fruitful backdrop for her romances – theatre is geared up to offer drama in many forms. One of the best features of each of her books so far is the banter between the leads; Parker’s distinct skill in this arena seems to be that she knows the line for each character that cannot be crossed for the relationship she is portraying but also for her reader’s compassion for those characters. Parker is shedding light on various aspects of her characters, which layers our understanding of them, as well as the character’s understandings of each other.  Making Up has all of Parker’s trademark wit, plus empathy and incisiveness, so it automatically has a lot going for it.

Thematically Parker is working in the arena of abusive relationships. Trix is healing from an emotionally abusive relationship tht stripped her down and made her less sure of herself and less likely to pursue her dreams. The other component of the theme resides in the B plot with Leo’s sister who is a complete Pain in the Ass, to the point that I hope not to see her again in future Parker novels. It would be easy to say the book would be better without her, because the drama she brings isn’t necessary. That would be wrong.  Cat is another facet of Parker’s theme, that people can fuck up, be damaged by their relationships and their choices, not be healed, and still be worthy of love and happiness.

Once more for the people in the back: even with mistakes, even after we survive abuse, even while we struggle with our mental illnesses, or our terrible choices we are worthy and deserving of happiness, but it may not come easily and that is okay. That is what Parker is working with in this novel. She doesn’t always completely hit the nail on the head, and this book isn’t as spectacularly excellent as its predecessors, but it is quietly very, very good.

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read, where we read what we want, review it how we see fit (within a few guidelines), and raise money in the name of a fallen friend for the American Cancer Society.

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A Week to be Wicked (CBR10 #16)

Another week, another Tessa Dare book review.

Image result for a week to be wicked

As I mentioned last review of The Duchess Deal, I love Tessa Dare books so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that I went ahead and picked up where I left off with A Week to be Wicked once I retrieved it. My quick review of this one is another five star Dare outing, these two back to back really highlight the parts of Dare’s craft that make these the fun, enjoyable, and downright witty reads I’ve come to hope for from her.

To me, Dare’s writing breaks down into a pretty clear set of standards:

  1. Independent lady making her way in the world
  2. More often than not a Marriage of Convenience plot
  3. Smolder and steamy sexy times
  4. Sincere emotion on display
  5. Wounded Hero, either physically or emotionally, who is smitten with the heroine.
  6. Interesting, but not overtaking, side characters
  7. Comedy/quirkiness/whimsy in some regard. Dare is not afraid of humor.

And with all of that we have a sincerely winning combination of components.

In this, the second book in the Spindle Cove series, Dare gives us one of my favorite of her leading ladies, Minerva Highwood. Minerva is the intelligent catch as an early geologist who is determined to make it to a Geological Symposium in Edinburgh to present her findings. Colin is the middling good at everything one, and obviously not as intelligent as Minerva (and the best part is that he knows it, and relishes in her brilliant mind). It’s energizing to read a romance where the man is not some infallible savior come into rescue the heroine- Colin gives it his best, but as he brings up time and again his best intentions go to hell and he doesn’t always manage to do what he says he will. As the reader, we watch a relationship grow, not just a physical attraction (not that it is lacking) and it feels much more realistic and emotionally satisfying than other romances often are.

I’m all about Tessa Dare lately, and for good reason. One word of caution though, Dare writes what I lovingly refer to as Historical Fantasy Romance. There is *some* historically accurate threads that Dare uses to weave her tapestry, but they are very thin and often bent to suit her wants.

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read, where we read what we want, review it how we see fit (within a few guidelines), and raise money in the name of a fallen friend for the American Cancer Society.

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The Duchess Deal (CBR10 #15)

Image result for the duchess deal

I did some traveling over the Easter holiday weekend and left the Tessa Dare book I was reading the week before at Ale’s house post snow storm. Not a problem – I have a nook full of other books in need of reading so I went ahead and pulled up another Dare, The Duchess Deal.

I had this one lined up and ready to go for two reasons: 1. I really love Tessa Dare books, and 2. this was nearly universally claimed as one of the few highlights of the 2017 publishing year for Romance by our Cannonball Romance Readers. So of course I purchased it immediately. The only drawback? I have a few months to wait until the next in the series, this terrible waiting is why I normally don’t start a series until later in the publishing order.

So what makes this one so good? Dare’s cleverness in wordplay and character development without some of her worst over the top tropes (no strange pets, just a regular old cat named Britches), a truly sardonic wit, and a bit of poking at modern social commentary right down to the use of the “she was warned…” speech which has inspired so many of us to adopt “nevertheless, she persisted” as our own battle cry.

The elevator pitch of this book is right in line with classic Dare: a disfigured Duke (literally half of his body covered in terrible scars from an explosion) needs an heir so he proposes marriage to the first convenient woman to meet his requirements (which are quite low), and the seamstress who was to have sewn his former fiancé’s wedding gown and is demanding payment marches in and takes his money but refuses his proposal. We are off to the races for a marriage of convenience plot (with ridiculous rules!) with a truly forbidding hero and plucky heroine.

I know I haven’t said much, but if Dare has ever done it for you, this book will probably hit all the right notes for you. Only four more months until the next one is published…

This book was read and reviewed as part of the charitable Cannonball Read, where we read what we want, review it how we see fit (with a few guidelines), and raise money in the name of a fallen friend for the American Cancer Society.