Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Readability: 📖📖📖 (The page count dragged for me and I was constantly distracting myself with other stuff because I struggled to come back to it)
Feels: 🦋🦋🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔💔
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡⚡
Romance: 💞💞💞
Sensuality: 💋💋💋💋 (Overall the scenes were decent and held a lot of that emotional/explicit combo I wanted – but they were also a touch light (compared to her later work) with some fading and lots were interrupted.
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥 (If you’re generous with the third)
Humor: A bit – quite a bit of bickering humor between them
Perspective: Third person from the heroine, hero and the hero’s mother (eww)
More character focused or plot focused? character
How did the speed of the story feel? medium
When mains are first on page together: Almost immediately
Cliffhanger: No, this ends with a happily ever after
Epilogue: Yes, 5 months later
Format: read on Kindle Unlimited

Should I read in order?
This is the first of Scott’s Heart’s Temptation series.

Basic plot:
Thornton and Cleo were a love match – but that was 7 years ago. Now she finds herself in his company at a country house party.

Give this a try if you want:
- Victorian (1880)
- second chance romance – after a 7 year separation
- house party
- masquerade
- you’re okay with mention of infidelity and the heroine being married when she reconnects with the hero
- very small epistolary section
- medium steam – 3 full scenes if you’re generous with the last one as it’s pretty short.

Ages:
- heroine is 25, hero is about 30

First line:
Cleo, Countess Scarbrough, decided there had never been a more ideal moment to feign illness.

My thoughts:
I know this is one of Scott’s earlier works and probably doesn’t have the same writing voice her more recent novels have. I did read Her Errant Earl awhile ago, but this is my second by her.

This one was quite a bit lighter in steam that her more recent releases. It had a number of kisses and partial scenes, but only 3 ‘full’ scenes and 1 was really quite light and short.

This book had a whole bunch of things that are at the bottom of the barrel for my romance likes, which is totally my preference and not the book’s fault. I didn’t connect with either main – I thought the hero was a complete jerk (which I usually like, honestly) but he just said things that bothered me through the entire book (I can deal with a bit in the beginning and then he stops). He just came off to me as very immature. I felt like he acted young – the way he talked and handled his emotions, the getting drunk because he was ‘bored’. I just didn’t like it.

I did like the heroine a bit, but not much because her decisions and lack of communication bothered me.

There was a lot of things I wasn’t a fan of that went right up until the end of the book. This also contains quite a few tropes I just don’t usually like.

  enemies to lovers bickering. Second chance. Pregnancy. Lies. Other woman drama. Toxic AF mother in law.

This felt like more of a high drama plot with the angry and judgmental mother in law and the heroine being married, and the hero jealous of other men and the heroine jealous of other women...it was very ‘soap opera’-ish which just isn’t my jam but I know many people enjoy!

There were a couple interactions I liked. And I did really like Ravenscroft as a side character so I’m excited for his book.

Quotes/spoiler-y thoughts:Any mistakes/typos are my own

oh, my

Thornton twisted her until her back slammed against the door with a thud. His tongue swept into her mouth. Her hands gripped his strong shoulders, pulling him closer. An answering ache blossomed within her. Somehow, he found his way under her skirts, grasping her left leg at the knee and hooking it around his lean hip. Deliberate fingers trailed up her thigh beneath three layers of fabric, finding bare skin.
---
“What I choose to do with Cleo or any other woman here is no one’s concern but mine.”
“Why do you call her by her Christian name?”
“Because she is Cleo to me,” he said, the admission torn from him against his well. “She will always be Cleo.”

At this point the hero hasn’t endeared me to him much at all, but I kinda love Ravenscroft…

“Ravenscroft, you bastard,” he remarked in a deceptively casual tone, “have you become so depraved you’ve taken to peering beneath ladies’ skirts in the library?”
//
“Blessed angels’ sakes! Why would you fight over me?”
“Because you’re a beautiful woman,” Ravenscroft announced through gritted teeth at the same moment Thornton muttered, “Damned if I know.”
---
Thornton broke their kiss and caught her wrists, raising them above her head, pinning them to the bark with one strong hand.
//
Thornton looked into her eyes and a most wicked smile curved his mouth. “Now that I’ve gone you at my mercy, will you call me Alex?”
“Thornton,” she began.
“Naughty, naughty,” he said in a low voice, pulling her wrists higher.
 

Content warnings: These should be taken as a minimum of what to expect. It’s very possible I have missed some.

- mention of heroine’s husband cheating on the her throughout their marriage
- feelings of infidelity – the heroine has intimacies with the hero while she’s married (her husband is a dick)
- miscarriage remembered
- assault on page – the hero’s mother slaps the heroine
- hero calls the heroine a bitch (quite late in the book too – almost 90% in)

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes:

Safe sex: 

No. The heroine is married to someone else but has been separated from him for awhile. 

Hows the consent? 

  implied? Kind of? The hero definitely doesn’t ask and if he did the heroine would probably say no, though we are in her perspective and know she has a longing and feelings for him. 

2% neck kisses, beginning fingering for her
10% - kiss
21% - bath scene where he washes her hair and a kiss
30% - kisses
33% - kisses
44% - 🔥 kisses, fingering/oral for her, sex against a bookshelf

“Trust me, my love.”
“I do,” she said, meaning it. She clutched at her voluminous satin ad raised it to her waist.
He pressed his mouth to her inner thigh. “Hook your leg over my shoulder.”

54% - 🔥 kisses, blow job (incomplete), fingering/oral for her, missionary

When he reached for the fastening on his trousers, she stopped him.
“No.” She pushed him to his back on the bed and hooked her leg across his so that she straddled his lean hips. She dropped a kiss on his taut abdomen, savoring the rigid cords of his muscle, then moved lower, sinking a playful tongue into his navel.

72% - kiss
93% - 🔥 missionary – it’s pretty short
“You’re going to kill me, woman.”
“I can’t think of a better way to die.”