After a scandalous divorce from a coldhearted earl, Lady Miranda Lenox is finally free to pursue her dreams of operating a school of cookery. If she wants to continue attracting a polite clientele, however, Miranda needs her reputation to remain above reproach. What she doesn’t need is a rakish duke determined to lure her into further disgrace.
But Rhys will stop at nothing to get what he wants—the delicious Miranda in his bed. He’s so assured of his success that he offers her a wager. If she can resist his seduction for the duration of the next house party he’s hosting, he will abandon his pursuit of her. But if she succumbs, she’ll be his mistress in secret for a month.
It’s the perfect bargain. Except that once Rhys wins, he realizes one month with Miranda will never be enough. Nothing less than forever will do. But Miranda refuses to marry again, even as each clandestine encounter with Rhys leaves her one perilous step closer to ruin.
It would seem I’m now two-for-three on terrible books this week because this one also ended up being a DNF. But honestly, despite trying to finish every book I download, I could not force myself to spend one more second reading this sex-driven nonsense.
First things first, I know this is a personal pet peeve, but if you're going to repeatedly use explicit anatomical terms throughout your novel and provide detailed descriptions of the characters' intimate encounters, there is absolutely no reason to suddenly refer to breasts as "bubbies." Every single time that word appeared, I was ripped right out of the story because it sounds so absurdly juvenile that I genuinely started laughing.
Unfortunately, "bubbies" was the least of this book's problems.
The real issue was Rhys himself. The story begins with him wanting a particular cook to provide desserts for a house party after sampling their creations at a friend's dinner. Fair enough. The problem is that after receiving multiple firm refusals to his offer of hire, he decides that "no" simply isn't an acceptable answer. Rather than moving on with his life like a reasonable adult, he tracks down the owner of the establishment and essentially ambushes them outside their establishment (a cooking school).
Naturally, the owner turns out to be a woman.
And from that moment onward, Rhys becomes less interested in her desserts and more interested in possessing her. Once he realizes she's a "fallen woman" because of her scandalous divorce, the entire plot shifts from securing a cook for his guests to obsessing over Miranda herself. To the point where he's fantasizing about her and taking "himself in hand" mere hours after meeting her.
Now, I could have overlooked some of this. I've read this author before and know that her books tend to rely heavily on physical attraction and sex to drive the narrative. What I couldn't overlook was the fact that Rhys is an utterly manipulative creep who seems fundamentally incapable of accepting the word "no."
Suspecting that Miranda's cookery school is struggling financially, he offers her an obscene amount of money to provide desserts for his gathering, an offer she can hardly refuse given her circumstances. The catch? He conveniently neglects to tell her that this isn't an ordinary house party. It's a sexually charged gathering where participants are expected to engage in all manner of activities.
And somehow he only gets worse from there.
He repeatedly pressures Miranda to become his mistress for a month after the party. She refuses. Repeatedly and vehemently, yet every refusal seems to register as a challenge rather than an answer (because no one else has been able to resist him, how could she... and also her body and reactions just tells him that she wants him to0). To that end, Rhys manipulates situations to get her alone, arranges circumstances so she's staying near him, pressures her to dress in ways that make her uncomfortable, and inserts himself into her personal space at every available opportunity. At no point did I find any of this romantic. It was exhausting.
What makes it even more frustrating is that buried somewhere underneath all of this is a story that actually could have been interesting. Miranda's failed marriage, the reasons behind the fabricated affair, the role her family played in her unhappiness; those were the things I wanted to explore, and I kept reading far longer than I should have because I hoped the author would eventually shift her attention toward those plotlines.
Instead, Miranda continued martyring herself for causes no one else seemed invested in, Rhys continued being insufferable, and the endless sexual content swallowed up whatever story was trying to exist underneath it all.
At this point I've attempted multiple books by this author, hoping that eventually one of them would click for me. Perhaps someday I'll try another series and have better luck. Until then, I can only hope this author eventually discovers that a compelling plot should be more than just a brief intermission between bedroom scenes.
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