I read Don’t Bargain with the Devil at a snail’s pace. It was all I could do not to hurl the book out of the nearest window, and I could only take 20 pages at a time. While the plot is decent, the excruciatingly annoying characters doomed this story from the first chapter and made me want to tear my hair out.

We meet Lucinda Seton, a half-Spanish, half-English woman who’s currently teaching at a finishing school to show her ex-intended how proper and prim she can be, wild Spanish blood notwithstanding. While stretched out on a field, enjoying the sun, she is rudely awakened by the famous magician Diego Montalvo. They’re instantly attracted to one another, but Diego has an ulterior motive: he believes she could be a long-lost Spanish heiress. Sent by the Marques de Parama to find his missing granddaughter, Diego stands to gain his family’s old estate and fulfill the promise he made to his dying father. In order to spend more time with Lucy, he makes up a story about his intentions of purchasing the empty land adjacent to the school and creating a hedonistic pleasure garden. He invites Lucy to spend more time with him and try to change his mind about his garden, inevitably leading to a conflict of interests on Diego’s part as he falls in love with her.

The labels that the characters are given are almost completely opposite to their real selves. For example, Lucy’s entire dilemma at the beginning of the story is hinged upon the fact that she is an “outspoken hoyden.” Luckily, we are repeatedly reminded of the fact that she is a bigmouth, or else I’d have had absolutely no idea of this particular fault. In actuality (at least as much as is apparent to the reader), she is incredibly soft-spoken, to the point of irritating demureness. She’s always in terror of showing too much of her fiery Spanish blood, so she’s always keeping her mouth shut.

Even more irritating is the fact that she’s untried in the worst possible ways. When she first meets Diego, it’s like she’s the country mouse tasting her first sip of cheap champagne and falling in love with it. How she can be so swept up over the smarmy behavior Diego exhibits is beyond me. It’s rather laughable, because she even coyly tells Diego that she’s worldlier than she looks. Uh, not really. She falls hook, line and sinker for him, and her attempts at subverting his intentions of buying the property next door are clearly lame attempts at curbing her feelings for him. One glance at him, and she melts into a big puddle of goo.

Even worse is the dialogue, especially on Lucy’s part. Later in the book, Diego drugs and kidnaps her onto a ship. She wakes up, sees the portholes, and cries: “Diego Montalvo, you scoundrel! We are on a ship!” Why, yes darling, how astute of you. Unfortunately, the whole book is riddled with this kind of asinine dialogue, and it was a pain to read.

Diego is even more unlikable than Lucy. I’m assuming he’s the “devil” of the title, but really, he’d be better termed “the confused lesser demon.” His supposed allure consists of him calling Lucy cariño all the time and wearing very tight breeches that highlight his masculine body. That, and the fact that he has a thin black mustache and smells of hair oil, firmly entrenched in my mind an image of a younger Raul Julia as Gomez Addams of the Addams Family. This was unfortunate for me, as I later read in the author notes that she actually pictured Rodrigo Santoro as Diego. Whoops.

Still, completely dismissing my mental picture, Diego’s personality is not much better than that of a teenage boy’s. In the process of deciding his true goals, he is cowardly, full of misplaced pride, and generally wimpy. Every time he and Lucy have some argument, it inevitably ends with his “heart breaking” as he listens to her retreating sobs, or him using every ounce of effort not to leap to her side and cry for forgiveness in her arms. Repeat ad nauseam, and you’ve got the gist of their relationship. Some of his achy yearning is actually quite humorous to read about, like this particular line: “Without her, he felt ill, like a sailor deprived of lemons to stave off scurvy.” Almost poetic, isn’t it?

Oddly enough, the story is genuinely interesting. I was never entirely sure who the bad guy was until the very end, and I enjoyed the resolution of the mystery very much – barring the incredibly cheesy 3-way male confession at the very end. Actually, I liked the story very much until the last 20 pages, which are skippable. The secondary characters are more interesting than the main ones, and I was very disappointed to find that the true identity of the elusive “Cousin Michael” is never revealed.

As an aside, I’m not an epigram kind of person, and with the exception of one or two, the epigrams at the beginning of the chapters are really draggy. They really inhibited the flow for me, and made it that much harder to finish the story.

So, after all this has been said, I can’t really recommend Don’t Bargain with the Devil. The hero and heroine deserve each other, but you and I haven’t done anything to merit such punishment. If I ever pick up a later book in the series, it will only be to find out who Cousin Michael really is.