Review: Short and noneventful.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 10 30, 2012
The hero is an ex-pirate (OK, privateer or maybe pirate who pirates only from pirates) so I expected a little emotional swashbuckling here.  But no.  This is a generic, somewhat uninteresting romance.If you readThe Ugly Duchess (Happily Ever After...), you know all about Sir Griffin Barry, cousin of the hero of that book and renowned pirate who left his bride on their wedding night before consummation of the marriage and found himself on the high seas.  He spends the next 14 years pirating from pirates and slave ships, releasing the slaves, investing booty wisely and becoming a rich man.  An injury to his leg requires him to give up his pirating ways and he heads home.Griffin's wife Phoebe has been living an independent life and is not looking forward to or hoping for Griffin's return.  I, on the other hand, as a reader, was looking forward to this reunion, expecting major fireworks, with resentment, distrust, disgust and dislike of the hero on the part of the heroine.  Major groveling on the part of the hero would also have been good and most of the novel spent in a long and difficult reconciliation.But no.  Hero returns home.  Heroine is there with three children.  Hero sleeps with heroine.  That's basically it.  Everybody is happy.  (Except, I guess, for me.)  I also forgot to mention that there was some sort of estrangement between hero and his father and that also turned out to be a nonevent.So I found this to be disappointing and a bit boring.  I wanted some conflict between H and h.  I got nothing.  BTW, the novella takes up only 76% of the download.  The rest is Eloisa James promoting her other work.  Is she hard up for money lately?  She does a lot of self-promotion in her books' afterwords.