I picked this up because I had an ARC of the second in the series, and while it looked like I could read it as a standalone, the blurb seemed very interesting. Plus, I’ve been reading a lot of contemporaries lately and it’s always nice to pick up a fun historical. I really liked the characters in this one – Georgiana especially – but had some issues with the plot. I liked that she was a widow with a young son and that Rhys was basically a nobody – even if he was a wealthy nobody – which was a nice role reversal to the usual duke and female nobody you usually see. I also especially liked that Georgiana, as a duchess, had a lot of power in society for a woman, and she knew it. While I also enjoy the virgin heroine trope when it’s well done, too often it’s not, so it was also nice to read about a heroine who wasn’t, even if her sexual experience was only 30-something times (Rhys calculates this out in the book, which was truly hilarious). Georgiana and Rhys had amazing chemistry, and I loved the scenes they were in together.
“’I was going to say your wife.’ A role, he realized, he wanted to see her in, despite its impossibility. He was allowing himself to cross barriers because of the way she made him yearn for more. He frowned, suddenly restless. How had he not known there was a missing piece in his life? She had captured his attention and his thoughts with so little effort, it gave him pause. Here he was, wrapping himself into a web of his own making over a woman who likely saw him as nothing more than a temporary plaything.”
As for cons, I had some issues with the plot, specifically with some of Rhys’s actions – for instance, he kills a member of nobility and experiences zero repercussions. Also, he obtains a title and ingratiates himself into polite society very quickly – and it’s not that I necessarily think that couldn’t happen, as I’m sure money trumped pretty much everything else then as it does now, just that he went from zero to sixty in a matter of weeks.
Despite all that, I couldn’t put this book down, and I was very happy to have an ARC of the next book waiting in the wings!
