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We’ve been talking about doing a poll of our favorite series at AAR. I am sure the Wallflowers would make the list. The last book in the original series, Scandal in Spring, is on sale today. (Our review is here.)

American Daisy Bowman is the last of the “Wallflowers”, a group of four women: Daisy and her sister Lillian, and their friends Evie and Annabelle. All but Daisy have found husbands and happiness, and she despairs of finding the right man. Her overbearing father is also growing tired of spending money without any results to show for his efforts. Thomas Bowman announces to Daisy that if she cannot find a husband in the next two months, she will marry Matthew Swift, Bowman’s favorite employee and chosen successor.

Daisy is horrified by her father’s choice, as is her sister Lillian. Their father is shrewd but overbearing, and Matthew has striven to emulate their father for years. The memories she has of Matthew’s physical features leave something to be desired as well – Daisy likens him to a string bean. Matthew is due to arrive in England to help Bowman open a new branch of his soap business, and Daisy cannot bear the thought that she might be forced to marry him.

Days later at the wishing well at her sister’s home, Daisy decides to wish for a man she can love. After tossing her hairpin into the well, she is startled to see a well-built, handsome man come up the path behind her. When she realizes this glorious vision is Matthew, she is horrified. She tells him of her father’s plans, and Matthew is stunned, but for a completely different reason.

Matthew has loved Daisy for years. Even though she was merely polite to him at all the family dinners he attended, she fascinated him. Matthew never dared hope that Daisy would notice him, and even if she did, he feels his past would make it impossible for them to be together.

Their romance surprises both of them. Daisy can’t believe that she is attracted to Matthew, yet she enjoys his company. Matthew is shocked by Daisy’s attraction and desperately wants to marry her, but knows he cannot ruin her life. He’s also sure that her sister Lillian will object to their relationship.

Their courtship is amusing, and compelling. Daisy is a free spirit and a dreamer, much to her father’s dismay, but Matthew recognizes her individuality and supports her and her ideas. Lillian grudgingly comes to respect that Mathew would be a good choice for Daisy.

 

It’s 2.99 here at Amazon.

If you love Kleypas and don’t have Marrying Mr. Winterborne, you’re missing out big time. We gave it a DIK.

Marrying Winterborne is as engrossing a story as any of Ms. Kleypas’s earlier works–my favorite is It Happened One Autumn–and, in it, her writing is as good as it’s ever been.

The plot is, on the surface, a familiar one. Helen and Rhys, she an aristocrat and he a self-made magnate, are compromised–deliciously–and agree, again, to wed. Despite a sharing a desperate attraction for one another, their relationship is challenged by internal and external obstacles. Sounds conventional, right? It’s not.

For starters, Helen and Rhys decide to have Rhys compromise Helen so that their marriage will be a fait accompli and they both thoroughly enjoy Helen’s ruination. Rhys has burned for Helen since she nursed him back from a train accident in A Cold Hearted Rake. In that book, it seemed his passion was too overwhelming for Helen. This, however, isn’t the case. Helen is every bit as drawn to Rhys. She knows little of men but when Rhys kisses her, she knows that, that, is what she wants.

She had never imagined that a man would kiss her as if he were trying to breathe her in, as if kisses were words meant for poems, or honey to be gathered with his tongue.

Helen realizes being Rhys’s wife will challenge her in ways she can’t fathom–he runs an department store empire and his background is wildly different than hers–but that unknown future is exciting and full of possibilities. In that, it’s appealingly different from the life she thought she’d have, one in which she’d

meet an eligible man her family would approve of. A member of the landed gentry, bland and reserved, with a very tall forehead. He would expect her to make his wishes her own.

Rhys isn’t that man. He’s from a working class Welsh family, a self-made man and a fearsome competitor, someone who breaks more rules than he follows. He values his fortune with the fervor of one raised terribly poor and, other than Helen, he’s never needed anyone. But he needs Helen. As he tells her in one of the book’s many romantic passages, when he is with her, he is, for the first time, complete.

Helen and Rhys are smashing together–there isn’t a scene they share that doesn’t serve their love story. Each word and touch they exchange is making love, creating an abiding and encompassing relationship. Their love scenes are aren’t just erotic, they’re intimate. The two cherish everything–body, heart,and mind–about each other. Their Happily Ever After seems inevitable not because of the demands of the genre but because they belong with one another.

You can purchase it from Amazon here for 2.24.

Tired of oh-so-much sex in your historical romances? A Most Suitable Duchess by Patricia Bray might be just what you’re looking for: it has a kisses rating. In our review we wrote:

Country squire Marcus Heywood has come into the title of Duke of Torringford, unexpectedly and quite unprepared. What really upsets him, though, is the discovery that he will forfeit the bulk of the estate if he doesn’t have a wife by his thirtieth birthday, which is only a month away. Over one glass too many with his brother, he jokes that maybe he should just put an ad in the papers: Wanted – One Wife. For a laugh, they draw up a list of qualifications; Marcus promptly forgets about it and goes out of town for a few days. But his brother, who does have to place an ad for a new kennel master, sends the wrong ad to the newspaper. Upon his return, Marcus is outraged to find out that he’s received several replies to “his” ad.

One of them is an offer from a Miss Penelope Hastings, but she didn’t write it. Penelope’s a city girl, a minor patroness of the arts, with no prospective husband in sight. When she gets a message from the Duke of Torringford’s solicitor, she thinks it’s about a contribution to the astronomical society’s fundraiser, and is stunned to discover that someone has written to him posing as her. Of course she turns him down flat, in civil but firm tones, and considers that the end of the matter. But then her overbearing brother tells her that he wants to get married and needs her out of the house. He informs Penelope that her choices are to find a husband or retire to a small cottage she’s inherited, out in the middle of nowhere. Caught between a rock and a hard place, she has to make a choice.

This is a conventional marriage-of-convenience plot with very few surprises. What makes the book stand out from the pack are Marcus and Penelope. Marcus is a decent man caught in a difficult situation over which he has relatively little control, and who tries to make the best of things as they are, not as he wishes they could be. And he’s not just another bored, aimless nobleman either; he has an occupation that means a lot to him, for both the money and the satisfaction it earns him, and he’s not about to give it up just because he’s been elevated to the peerage. As for Penelope, she also gains satisfaction from her activities, and worries about walking away from them. Her new life is going to have to offer her something in return, and she’s not sure whether it will. That doubt added a certain depth to her that I appreciated.

It’s on sale at Amazon for 1.99 here.

The incredible Laurie Gold, the woman who started AAR, wrote many of our early reviews. She raved about His Wicked Ways by Samantha James.

Meredith Munro is in a convent where she is set to take her vows in a month, when she is kidnapped by Cameron McKay, whose father and brothers have been murdered by her father as part of a century-long clan feud. The beautiful, stubborn, deeply religious girl stuns Cameron from the start with her quiet and brave dignity. The lengthy journey back to his holding will delight readers who enjoy a good road romance.

Though his initial plan includes having Meredith’s father believe she is dead, Cameron doesn’t really know what to do with her once they return to his home. By this time, she’s saved his life, he’s saved hers, and they’ve both realized their powerful attraction to one another. Rather than throwing her into the “pit prison,” he ensconces her in one of the towers of his castle.

Meredith is reviled by the clan McKay even though no one is sure why the feud began. Through her goodness, she first reaches the children of the keep, and eventually the women, although not Moire, a lusty wench with designs on Cameron. Though Moire’s part in later nefarious goings-on is not difficult to figure out, she does make Meredith jealous, which heats things up considerably between Meredith and Cameron.

The deal Cameron eventually devises is this: if Meredith will bear him a son, he will free her. Where she will go is uncertain – she was raped at Munro keep a few years before by an unseen man, which is what caused her to go to the nunnery in the first place (she’s never told a soul about this, and when she shares her deep secret with Cameron, it’s very touching). Of course, while Cameron believes his deal is based on revenge, it is actually based on the love he has come to feel for Meredith, who loves him in return.

While these two figure each other out, the reader is treated to a variety of yummy love scenes, a stint on an island that will delight lovers of cabin romances, and an all-round, well-written romance. While new ground is not covered here, basic premises are handled deftly. The book is flawed only by the villains, who are too predictable.

The trust issue, which so marred Just One Kiss, is a basic premise in His Wicked Ways as well, but Cameron is a far better man than his predecessor. And Meredith is the better woman as well, even if she doesn’t see herself as brave, although Cameron does, and with good reason.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve enjoyed a medieval romance that was not a romp. I feel as though I’ve been welcomed home. You will too.

 

It’s at Amazon today for 1.99 here.

It’s not all just historical romance here today. We’re also happy to see Gunmetal Magic by the almost always superb Ilona Andrews on sale today. (Our review is here.)

Fans of the series know that Andrea is something of weapons nut. In this book we get a lot of information on her various toys and how she uses them. Andrea is rarely about brute force and is a lot more interested in the best tool for the job. The authors do a great job of intertwining this fighting style with Andrea’s personality. As a child she experienced a lot of physical abuse. As an adult, she has no problem bringing the pain – she just prefers to do it one step removed from the nasty mess of it. Here, Andrea slowly comes to terms with the fact that as a shifter, she is a weapon. She begins to embrace the boudha part of herself, something she had long denied. The difficult part of this is that she is also a unique type of shifter, a beastkin, for which she faced severe bigotry in her first pack. It takes awhile for her to accept that the huge Atlanta Pack does not have the same opinion of her origins as her abusers did. As Andrea learns to accept her whole self she finds herself becoming a warmer, stronger person. She can have the luxury of loving others since she has finally learned to love herself. Naturally, that makes a big difference to her story arc with Raphael.

The two begin the story several weeks after an argument which has had them in zero contact with each other. Neither feels they were in the wrong, neither makes a first move, and the silence is deafening. As they reconnect due to the crime, Raphael does a few stupid things to make her even angrier. But the new Andrea finds she has what it takes to bring this Alpha to his knees and make him completely hers. At first I feared their relationship was going to be all snarky comments and nasty comebacks, but they settled into a nice niche about halfway through the book which helped a lot. I really like these two as a couple – Raphael, who had a decent family life growing up, brings stability and sweetness to the relationship. He’s a strong warrior but he’s not one of those that feels the need to prove it every five minutes; he is deceptively easy going and laid back most of the time. Andrea is intense but with Raphael she can relax and let her playful side out.

The mystery of the novel is layered and its solution is equally complicated. Of course it involves a lot of heavy fighting, strange magical creatures, dangerous magical shifts, and the appearance of new power players. Somehow the authors always turn these familiar elements into a fascinating new mix. I didn’t even try to guess what would happen next – I let it joyfully unfold before me as I devoured the book page by page.

Kate, Curran, and company are important players in the novel. These don’t feel like “guest appearances” since these characters all have reason to interact with Andrea on a regular basis. We learn some interesting factoids about shifter history and get additional background on some of our ongoing favorite secondary characters. I’m always left a little awed by what these folks can pack into a novel. The world-building is of course superb and explained so naturally that the information gathering happens as easily as breathing.

Fans of the Kate series won’t want to miss this different perspective on her unique world. This works fine as a stand alone novel as well, though if you decide to go back and read the first few be warned that this one contains spoilers for them. For paranormal fans I would call this a must read. You just don’t find many books on the market as good as this one.

It’s on sale here for 1.99.

We talk about old-skool historicals a lot, but there are also old-skool contemporary romances. Susan Anderson’s Be My Baby is sort of one in that it has a alpha hero whose thoughts about women would not go over well on most college campuses. But, as like many a romance hero, all he really needs to become a dreamboat is to get tangled up with a clever woman. We gave this love story a DIK.

I am not at all fond of womanizers, especially as heroes. But is Beau actually a womanizer, or does he just think he wants to be?

Juliet Rose Astor Lowell comes to New Orleans to open up the newest hotel in her Daddy’s chain – the hotel she thinks of as a sign of her growing independence, as she was in charge of it from the day it was conceived. Juliet comes from old East Coast family lines, and for the first time finds herself away from family constraints, or so she thinks. There has been a threatening letter by someone who is unhappy with the opening of her hotel – threatening enough for her Daddy to ask the acting police chief to assign her some protection. Thus, police officer Beau Dupree finds himself the unwilling babysitter to a northern socialite. He vows to offend her enough to get himself reassigned, but finds Juliet not as easily offended or even as predictable as he at first believes.

There is so much to like about this book that I will attempt to keep it short. For one, both Juliet and Beau are complex, interesting, strong, and very likable. The whole book vibrates with atmosphere – I felt the heat and humidity, sensed the casual intimacy that is New Orleans, felt the history and the constant flow of good times. The suspense and the budding relationship are perfectly balanced. The secondary romance is filled with wonderful humor and is almost as delightful as is the romance between Beau and Juliet. Beau’s nickname for Juliet starts off as an irritant, and gradually becomes endearing. And who could resist a hero named Beauregard?….

Be My Baby starts a bit on the shaky side, especially if you aren’t fond of heroes who so easily can fit the word tits into casual conversation (Jose Lee, by the way, is the youngest of Beau’s three sisters). Stick it out for those few more pages, because you will not only get an excellent and entertaining read, you might feel like you have actually been to New Orleans, and that, to me, is saying something about the talent of this author.

It’s on sale at Amazon for 1.99 here.

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