Review: A nice, short read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 24, 2012
This book is a fast-paced, fairly easy read with sensuous scenes and a ton of passion.Henry St. Giles, the Earl of Cravenswood, is sad that his longtime mistress and friend, Milicent, is now with a new protector. Henry had thought he loved her, and felt heart broken that she left him. Although he is just as much a rake as his friends the Marquis of Wolverstone (book: To Wager the Marquis of Wolverstone) and the Duke of Dangerfield (book: To Dare the Duke of Dangerfield), it is love that he seeks in his marriage. When upon a moonlit night he laments again on losing Millicent, and drunkenly shares a passionate interlude with a mysterious beauty, he believes himself to have found his soul mate, and sought to find her in all possible haste.Lady Amy Shipton, the daughter of a duke and Henry's neighbor, has been in love with him for years. She tries very hard to get him to notice her not as a young girl but a woman grown, when one night she stumbles across Henry in his garden and shares a searing kiss with him. Their embrace might have gone farther if she had not hear him murmur the name of another woman, and in her attempt to flee the garden before he became aware of her identity, drops an emerald earring given to her out of gratitude by the Marquis of Wolverstone. Now Henry is set on finding her, and she is thinking of ways to get her earring back before he honorably asks for her hand and traps them both in an unwanted marriage...Mrs. Evans has again written a well-paced story with two endearing characters who both have their own shadows to conquer. Henry is an honorable and considerate man despite his reputation as a rake, and wants a perfect love that belongs only to him. Amy has harbored an unrequited love for years, and is ready to give up her pursuit of Henry until they shared a moment of passion in a garden. While Henry enlists the help of his friends to find his mysterious lady, they continue to try to get him into a marriage with Amy, which does lead to a few unwanted disasters and misunderstandings. Henry, to his credit, figures out the identity of his mysterious lady fairly quickly, and finally sees Amy for the woman that she is. He sets about wooing her while mistakenly believing her to love his friend Marcus, the Marquis of Wolverstone. The misunderstanding is not solved until the last 1/4 of the book, and even when they had their confrontation and have their intimate moments, Amy does not tell him of her fear that his love will fade, just as she tried to avoid a marriage like her mother's. Henry is all charms, yet he is also flawed. The final conflict seems too forced, and the resolution too sudden, which shows some weakness in Henry's professed great love for Amy. Yet, despite the weaknesses in Henry's character and his rather poor explanation of why he no longer loves Millicent over Amy, this book is a fairly good read for its length. If made longer, the character flaws might compel me to give it a lower score.