Review: Very romantic
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 6, 2011
I tried very very hard to keep my expectations down for this book.  I originally stumbled upon an excerpt and it was great so pre-ordered it immediately.  Then I found out that this author writes erotica a different name (Willing Victim) and got even more excited.  Then before it actually came out I read a couple of great reviews.  So I knew that my expectations were ballooning to unreasonable proportions.I have to say, this book reminded me A LOT of a historical I've read:The Prince of Midnight.  It's not that I think it was copied or anything, but the characters are so similar that my mind kept drawing the parallel again and again.  Let's see, in both books there's the seductive Lothario-esque hero, with his French accent and culture and his ability to cook and his heyday of fame which he now shuns in favor of a solitary life with his animal, and he has to go back out into society to help the heroine.  Then there's the practical, prickly heroine with no family and a rough childhood, seeking out the hero for some sort of weird emotional/revenge bid related to said childhood.  She is sharp and even a little mean but he just finds it amusing, probably because women always came too easily to him, and despite the heroine's best efforts to resist, they fall in love.I liked this book and I would've liked it even better had it not been built up so much in my head.  I'm not sure if I prefer her erotica better, although this was undeniably more romantic.  One thing that I really liked about this book was that the villain was not 100% evil, as is so often the case.  Yeah, he did something mean, which is how they got into this mess in the first place, but other descriptions of him just place him as a rather ordinary, selfish rich guy.What I disliked about the book was that it left the heroine's issues as a loose end.  She had a rough childhood that was totally vague but which seemed to have a huge impact on her - her sex life and her thinking she wouldn't make a good parent, but that wasn't really resolved in any way.  I really needed one more chapter where she opens up to him in a way she hadn't before, addresses her fears and they decide to take a chance together, despite their troubled pasts and apparent unsuitability at domesticity.  Instead, they just sort of decide it separately and we find out it happened in the epilogue, which is years later.