Review: Easy, breezy read
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 18, 2012
Married off at a young age to a wealthy banker, who subsequently divorced her on false accusations of adultery, Alexandra Thurston is a woman bent on revenge. After five years abroad, she's come to Charleston to stay with her favorite aunt, but since she's branded as an adulteress she's shunned by polite society.  That doesn't stop plantation owner and notorious womanizer Connor Manning from admiring her beauty, and he makes a bet that he'll be able to charm Alexandra into his bed. Alexandra is focused on revenge against her ex-husband, but Connor's charms eventually start breaking down those barriers, and things get even more complicated when Alexandra's wealthy father pays a visit and decides it's time get his daughter wedded, bedded and pregnant with an heir and he thinks Connor just might be the man for the job."For a woman of easy virtue, he had met more resistance from her than a spinster Sunday school teacher."Now how to rate this book - I liked it, liked the main characters and they did have a good spark of chemistry going and really had a hard time putting it down. That said, despite a good story there were enough issues with the reading experience that I really can't rate it higher. There were more steamy kisses than sex scenes, but when the sex was there (twice, I think), it was a wee bit on the cheesy side, and a bit OTT for my tastes (YMMV). There was also a bit of repetition/redundancy in some of the prose that wore thin by the end, I got a bit weary of hearing all about the Louis XV furniture at Connor's plantation, plus Alexandra's breasts were crushed against Connor's chest one too many times. The Kindle edition I purchased had a lot of formatting errors, no breaks between paragraphs and a lot of run on words,"his seventeenyearold sister", "twostory", "Qnly"This book was originally published in 2000, so I'm guessing these typos are conversion errors. I obtained my copy as a freebie, but if I had paid full price I'd be a bit miffed. I noticed a comment from the author on another review that the formatting is being addressed, but I'd recommend taking a free same prior to buying to make sure you are getting your money's worth.ETA 4/25/12: I was notified by Amazon that an updated version was available for download to correct editing errors. I have downloaded it and reviewed it briefly. The paragraph breaks are now there, but I clicked onto several highlighted passages and the typos are still there.