Bonus Review: Kisses, She Wrote

Kisses, She Wrote

By Katharine Ashe

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: 

December 3, 2013

Charles Camlann Westfall, the Earl of Bedwyr copes with a painful past by living life on the surface. Incredibly handsome, with more than his fair share of charm, he has found this strategy a viable way of life as he moves lightly through ballrooms and gambling dens and through the hearts and bedrooms of willing widows and dissatisfied wives. Only a few close friends realize that there is more to Cam than the witty charmer the ton knows. For a variety of reasons, Cam finds it convenient to make an extended stay at the Brittany chateau that belongs to his cousin Luc, the Comte de Rallis. Life is much quieter there than in Cam’s usual haunts such as London and Paris. It is restlessness that sets him looking for a deck of cards. Instead, he finds a diary belonging to Jacqueline, Princess of Sensaire. He can’t resist reading a few pages, and once he begins, forgetting all notions of honor, he continues, uncomfortable and intrigued to discover that he figures prominently in the princess’s thoughts.

Jacqueline may be a princess by birth, but she has little in common with princesses of fairy tale fame. She is plain of face rather than beautiful and straight in body lines rather than curvy. Shy and bookish, she also lacks the social skills expected of a princess. There is no villainous stepmother in her life, just a determined mother who has always found Jacqueline less than satisfactory as a daughter and a princess. Jacqueline knows that regardless of her lack of feminine allure and accomplishments, she will soon be wed to an English lord of her brother’s choosing. Reiner loves his sister, and Jacqueline is confident that he will choose a kind husband for her, but he also expects the alliance to be one that will benefit Sensaire. And he has warned Jacqueline that while the Earl of Bedwyr may be a friend of the Prince of Sensaire, he is not husband material for the princess. But Cam, who is her opposite in every way, captures Jacqueline’s heart and imagination. He may have no place in her life, but he has a central role in her fantasies, the ones she records in her diary.

As Cam becomes more and more captivated by Jacqueline’s diary, he makes a point of getting to know Jacqueline the woman and comes to appreciate her intelligence and her honesty. A friendship of sorts develops between the two. When the Brittany party moves to London, Cam finds himself seeking out both Jacqueline and her diary, which is growing more and more filled with sensual details of her fantasies. Jacqueline’s fantasies feed Cam’s own, and they inspire him to capture the story in verse form. Meanwhile, his great-aunt offers him the one thing from his past that he associates with happiness. All he has to do to claim it as his own is marry the coldly proper beauty that his aunt has chosen for him. Separate paths are clearly marked for Cam and Jacqueline, but their fascination and understanding of one another deepens with every encounter. Is the shared world their imaginations create for them individually strong enough to withstand the expectations of reason and reality?

This is a near perfect novella. Part of Ashe’s Prince Catchers series, it can be read as a standalone but will be especially appreciated by readers who liked Cam and Jacqueline in I Married the Duke. Novellas can seem padded as if an author is stretching a slim story to fit the form. I find more often, the story seems too large for the form, leaving the reader, no matter how engaging the characters, longing for more chapters to give a satisfying conclusion. Ashe avoids both these traps. Her novella feels fully developed, and it offers readers a wonderful, sigh-worthy conclusion. Even the title and the cover fit!

Kisses, She Wrote is also a deeply romantic story. I loved the use Ashe makes of the diary and the fact that the seductive hero, who is articulate and graceful in speech, is himself seduced by the power of the written words of the heroine, who can find speech awkward. And I loved that the thread involving the power of the written word is introduced in the beginning and runs through to the end.

I’m adding this to my list of favorite novellas. If you are looking for a quick read with a Christmas setting that features likeable, interesting characters and a sweet, sensual romance with a different twist, you can’t do better than this one. I highly recommend it.

I was thrilled when Cam was revealed as a poet. I’ve known some sexy poets, and I think it’s only just that one gets his day in romance fiction’s hero spotlight. How do you feel about poets as heroes?

Tuesday Review: I Married the Duke

Note: I'm barely squeaking under the wire to make this a Tuesday Review. I spent a good portion of today in the emergency room and forgot that this had not been posted. My apologies for the tardiness.

I Married the Duke

By Katharine Ashe

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: August 27, 2013

The Caulfield sisters were sent to England by their mother when they were very young, too young to have more than sketchy memories of their mother. When the ship taking them to England sinks, they are the only survivors. They know nothing about their father, and, with no relatives to claim them, they are sent to an orphanage and later adopted by a widowed clergyman. All the girls have from their former lives is a valuable ruby ring. According to a gypsy seer, the ring holds the key to their father’s identity, an identity that will be revealed only when one of the three sisters marries a prince.

The middle sister Arabella takes the gypsy’s message to heart. Thirteen years later, after having worked several years as a finishing governess and having established a reputation as being particularly skilled at preparing young ladies for their debuts and seeing them through their first season, Arabella is on her way to Saint-Nazaire in France where she is to prepare the younger sister of the Prince of Sensaire for her debut in London. Arabella hopes that she will be able to attract the Prince’s attention and through him fulfill the prophecy. It’s not impossible; after all, she has been fighting off the attention of male employers throughout her career. But when she misses her ship, her most pressing need is to get to her destination by September 1 when her employment is supposed to begin. Her best hope of doing this is securing a place on board the ship commanded by Captain Andrew.

Lucian Westfall, former commander of HMS Victory, Comte de Rallis, and heir apparent to the Duchy of Lycombe, for the past year has been known to many simply as Captain Andrew of the merchant brigantine Retribution. He has the boldness of a pirate, an effect intensified by the eye patch he wears, and the arrogance of a lord. He is not at all amenable to the request for passage on his ship from the sharp-tongued young woman he identified as a schoolteacher at first sight. His first response is a resounding no, but she is persistent. Her reason for missing her ship and the fact that her destination is a castle that belongs to him persuade Luc to consent to accept her as a passage.

What follows is a romantic adventure that encompasses a variety of romance tropes, including shipboard romance, marriage of convenience, and secrets—dangerous and deadly. More than once their barely cheat death. Arabella and Luc are all wrong for each other. She cannot lose her chance with a prince when it is finally within her grasp. She believes this is the only way to find out who she is and the only route to securing her sisters’ happiness. He needs a blue-blooded wife to provide the heir he is desperate for in case he does become the Duke of Lycombe. For the sake of his beloved brother and all the hundreds of people dependent upon the duchy, he must have an heir. It is the only way to finally defeat the Reverend Absalom Fletcher, his mad, abusive, hypocritical guardian. However, reason proves no match for the irresistible, sizzling attraction between the governess and the piratical lord. But before they can attain an HEA, they must learn to trust one another and work together to defeat the powerful enemy who wants Luc dead.

I Married the Duke is the first book in Ashe’s new Prince Catchers series, and the story of the mysterious ring and the identity of the three orphan sisters is tantalizing bait for series addicts. I knew as soon as I read the prologue that I was fairly caught and would not be satisfied until I turned the final page of the third book.

Arabella and Luc are each interesting characters in their own right, and their banter, their chemistry, and the healing they offer each other make them a couple guaranteed to appeal to a romance lover’s heart. If Arabella seems rather too rash at times and Luc seems foolishly reluctant to share truths with her, these are forgivable flaws in a compelling story with complex characters and more than one moment of heart-stopping suspense. I think Ashe has a winner!

If you like your romance with plenty of action, lots of heat, and characters, both primary and secondary, who capture your interest and affection, I recommend this book.

I love quiet romance novels, but I also like to mix them up sometimes with romances high in action. What’s your preference?

Tuesday Review: How a Lady Weds a Rogue

How a Lady Weds a Rogue

Falcon Club #3

By Katharine Ashe

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: September 25, 2012

Diantha Lucas may be headstrong and troublesome, but she’s wise enough to know that traveling in a public coach without even a maid jeopardizes both her reputation and her physical safety. Her carefully constructed plan to visit her scandalous mother in Calais while the rest of her family thought her visiting a school friend hit a snag when Annie, the friend’s maid who was to accompany Diantha on her adventure, abandoned her for adventures of her own with a handsome farm lad and his interesting muscles. Diantha needs a hero, and just as she is realizing how rare heroes are, she recognizes one of her fellow passengers as a gentleman who has already proved himself not just a generic hero but her particular hero.

Whatever anyone else may think, Wyn Yale knows that he’s no hero. Fortunately, he is an expert at rescuing and returning runaway girls. Such tasks have become his specialty in his work for the Falcon Club. Wyn has to see a man about a horse, and then he plans to end his career by killing that man, a duke whose lies and licentiousness were behind the death of one runaway Wyn could not save. For five years, he has gone about his business for the Falcon Club, using alcohol as a sedative to enable him to tolerate the pain and guilt of his failure. But once he recognizes Diantha as the sister-in-law of one of his closest friends, he understands that his mission will be delayed until he can return her to her family. 

Wyn soon discovers that returning Diantha before she has achieved her goal is far more difficult than he suspected. He doesn’t doubt his ability to do so, but he understands that this job will be more challenging than any other he has encountered. Thus, the two begin a journey together, equal in their determination that the journey end according to their very different plans. They are joined by a motley collection of strays that Diantha charms and befriends, and the journey is complicated by Wyn’s struggle to stay just sober enough to stay in control, by those in pursuit of Wyn, and by the spark between Diantha and Wyn that threatens to ignite at every touch.

Ashe has given readers two completely engaging characters in Diantha and Wyn. Most readers will recognize that the innocent beauty with a kind heart, and an underappreciated intelligence whose naïveté adds to her charm as a romance heroine who perhaps made her first appearance in novels by Georgette Heyer. Diantha is a delightful example, true to type and yet appealing as an individual. Despite some grim elements in her history, she possesses a contagious joy that lightens Wyn’s darkness and touches the reader. The silver-eyed Wyn with his formidable intelligence is a tortured hero par excellence, and his Welsh background is a bonus. My favorite part of the book was the time they spent in Wyn’s home in Wales.

For all its lightness (and there are some deliciously humorous moments), the story deals with substantive issues such as alcoholism, the nature of heroism, and the self-sacrificial element in love.

How a Lady Weds a Rogue can be read as a standalone. Readers new to Ashe should have no difficulty following Diantha and Wyn’s story, but fans of the series will be pleased to see characters from earlier books make brief appearances. The continued exchange of letters between Lady Justice and Peregrine is almost interesting enough to distract one from the main plot, and Lady Constance grows more intriguing in this book. I’m eager to see where Ashe goes next with this series.

I seem to have read a large number of books recently that combine humor and darkness. Do you prefer your romances dark or light? Or are you persuaded that the best books are those that evoke both tears and laughter?

Special Monday Review: How to Be a Proper Lady

How to Be a Proper Lady

Falcon Club Book #2

By Katharine Ashe

Publisher: Avon

Release Date: June 26, 2012

Viola Carlyle was only ten years old when her biological father, Fionn Daly, abducted her from the Devonshire estate where she had spent the first decade of her life as the cherished daughter of a baron, Lord Carlyle, and his lady wife. Fifteen years later, Viola is Violet la Vile, captain of the April Storm, an American privateer vessel sailing for the state of Massachusetts. Beautiful, confident in her position, adored by her crew, she has buried lingering memories of her other life.

Jinan Seton owes Alex Savege (Captured by a Rogue Lord) his life twice over: the first time when he bought the freedom of the child Jin who had been sold into slavery and the second time when he had taken an angry, self-destructive adolescent aboard the Cavalier and given him a chance to grow to manhood. Alex’s purpose now it to make his wife happy, and Serena Savege clings to the belief that her younger sister Viola is alive. Nothing would add more to Serena's happiness with Alex that a reunion with her sister. Nothing will keep Jin from finding Viola Carlyle and returning her to the family who loves her. He will use all the skills honed in service to the Falcon Club to complete this search and repay his debt to Alex.

Even Captain Violet la Vile’s sinking his beloved Cavalier and having him thrown in an American jail doesn’t lessen his determination to see her become Viola Carlyle again and restored to her rightful place. If he has to sign on as her second-in-command, he will; if he has to accept a wager that she can make him fall in love with her to get her safely back to England, he will. But Jin has no idea how that wager will test him nor the price it will exact from him. And Viola has no idea that the infamous Pharaoh whose ship she sank successfully will come to rule her heart and threaten the world she has carefully constructed to replace what she lost.

Katharine Ashe continues to intrigue readers with her Falcon Club series by creating extraordinary characters with histories that set them apart from run-of-the-mill heroes and heroines and endowing these characters with intelligence, courage, and humor. Viola and Jin are memorable characters. I was rooting for them both from the beginning.

The second part of the story could easily have seemed anticlimactic once Viola and Jin arrive in England, but Ashe adds sufficient complications to keep her readers engaged. Neither the plot nor the relationship between Viola and Jin loses steam. And while I admit to some uneasy moments when Viola's feelings for Jin seem to have diminished her admirable capabilities as an intelligent, independent woman, in the end she shows that the spirit of Violet la Vile is still alive.

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Pirates seem to be enjoying a new surge in popularity, and How to Be a Proper Lady, despite its title, combines enough of the old school dash with a more contemporary flavor to be a welcome addition to the lists. If you’ve read Captured by a Rogue Lord and When a Scot Loves a Lady, you definitely don’t want to miss this one. If you haven’t read Ashe before, you will appreciate this book, especially if you like pirate stories or if you like variety in your romances. I think the book works well as a standalone, although you may miss some of the nuances. 

Falcon Club membership is now down to three. I’m wondering of that means three more books. I’m particularly eager to know more of Colin Gray and “Lady Justice.”

How do you feel about pirate books? Do you have a favorite?