The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Valcourt Heiress works her unique magic again—in three novels of unforgettable historical romance set in the Regency era.
So I just finished the first book of this series midnight magic. And gosh I was hoping for so much much more.
It had so much potential to be the perfect romance slow build love story. Instead it just fell flat.
2nd son Hawk has to marry a Scottish lady out of a plea and promise to his dad. His dad the Marquess, was saved in battle by Scotsman. As a thank you twenty years prior, the marquess offers one of his sons to marry one of the acotsmans 3 daughters, Clare, the painter, 17yrold Violet, the chatterbox and good socialite, or 19yrold perfect for him Frances. Problem Frances doesn’t want to be sold off as a wife and disguised herself as an ugly Dowd.
Thinking that he then won’t be bothered by his ugly and mousy wife he selected Frances and he can go off back to his mistress who then tells Hawk he has to treat his wife as a true lover in the bedroom and not as a mousy lady who doesn’t want sex.
So to please his father and since his elder brother has died most mysterious death, he does his duty and slecrsnFrances.
Problem. : from the get go it’s all about the husbands duties and he has to bed his wife and make an heir. And while she consents because she has to, she lets him stick his dick in her without Andy love or passsion or him asking her any feelings. There were just too many nights like this. It could have been so much more. And still be the same sorry. So disappointed when he is chasing her through the house in the middle of the night and finds her in the sewing room. And then he somehow consoles her back to the bedroom and fucks her because she “lets him�. It just felt too rapey. And maybe because she wrote this in 80s. And that was still kinda the trope. I don’t know. It just could have been so much better. I hustended up not liking Hawk and I really wanted too. He could have talked to his father about his fathers experoence with love and women and his mother.
My rewrite would be this. Marries dowdy woman. As obligation. He beds her once to consimmmate the marriage. And then leaves her alone back to London his mistress and Wiley ways for months to unbeknownst t to him fix up the house and become the beautiful woman that she is and with knowledge of keeping the horse breeding business on the state turns all their financial troubles around and through all that they learn to grow and love and respect each other and end up having hot sex in the tack room for really first time. Slow build. Months apart. Then given time when he reappears to still have spar and poke each other and call each other out. Could have been so much fun watching their love/hate and get some good kisses in there. And have him actually stay in bed with her after he’s fucked her. Because really there was no making love. He didn’t teach her the art of love making. He just did it to her.
Oh god. It could have been so much better. I can’t even write what it should hav even. But the whole time I was reading it I kept erewriting it in my head.
By and1515 When his sick father sent a message summoning him home we'll he did what any good son did and that was to drop everything and hurried as fast as he could. Hawk should have known better his father obviously unwell but still he wanted him to run off to the wilds of Scotland. Frances wasn't happy when her father announced that one of them was to be married she had no intentions of leaving her home so Frances knows she had only one shot and she was darn well going to take it. Unfortunately her plan utterly backfires and now she's truly caught in her own web of deceit. The retched man was supposed to choice one of her sisters not her but here she was saying I dos together before rushing off. Frances wasn't impressed with his so called manly ways in fact she just wanted him to go away but no the rotten man an his so-called rights to his little wifey. His father had lied to him apparently he wasn't dying anymore but he was married now. London was leaving running for the city as fast as he dared tried to leave after all he did what he'd been conned into now back to the life he wanted to live. The funny thing was her father in-law knew from the moment he saw her that she was more then she'd been pretending to be and his poor son was a blind fool. Her husband was a triple fool he owned some of the most beautiful horses she'd ever seen and they were grown fat and lazy. Hawk didn't know what to think this wasn't how his wife looked when he ran away to London. He was totally infuriated with his wife who lied to him. You saw what you wanted to see and you never looked any closer. He never wanted a wife who looked like her and she never wanted an English husband. She was driving him crazy she did everything he didn't want her to and she flat out ignore him. However some how tonight he finally got something right because she was a lit roman candle about to explode and she took him right of that super duper magical place that he never wanted to leave.
Horrible! I got the full trilogy CD/Audio to help me stay awake for a long drive (this was the only Regency Romance CD I found at Barnes & Noble). I never read any of Catherine Coulter books, but read the back of the case and the description seemed good. WRONG!! Yuck! Bleuck! Bad, awful story and hero's!! In Moonspun Magic the Hero tells the Heroine to just grin and bare the sex it will be over fast - more than once. In the book Calypso Magic the hero rapes the girl. This author writes the same awful men characters in the first 2 books. Leary but hoping for a better 3rd book in the trilogy, but NOPE, the 3rd story was just as awful if not worse of a hero from the prior 2 books. The author writes some form or another of rape in the story or the threat of it by the hero to the heroine. NOT FOR ME!!!
It's too bad the auther put so much rape in this book. It's a great story with good characters. The best part of the book was when Hawk leaves for London.