Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-93261-4
Historical Romance, 2017

Sometimes I feel like the romance genre is trolling me. Finally, I find an intelligent, competent heroine in Helen Dickson’s Carrying the Gentleman’s Secret, and how nice, Lydia Brook just has to be paired with one of the most brutally cruel heroes I’ve come across in a while.

Alex Golding, the “hero”, stops Lydia from marrying his vile brother-in-law, who is already married to his sister.

He is attracted to Lydia, so after knowing that she is vulnerable and learning that she is all alone in the world after her father vanished on her, seduces her. When she realizes that perhaps she has read too much into their boinking, he proceeds to cruelly mock her naïveté and yikes, he goes on and on and on that I actually turn to back cover to check again whether this guy is supposed to be the hero.

So yes, he then dumps her, thinking once in a while about what a hot lay she is, but the author justifies his decampment by reminding me that losing his wife had hurt his fee-fees so everything he does now is A-OK. Oh, and the author will keep doing this throughout the story, because for some reason she believes that I find this case of cruelty sexy and romantic.

Still, Lydia now needs to get her whole life together again, so she seeks out Alex and reminds him of his promise to help her out. She is a seamstress and she wants to open her own business, so she wants him to walk the talk and invest in her business.

Unfortunately, this means that she’s not getting away from that POS anytime soon, so the “romance” proceeds apace in a pattern of him being a leaking septic asshole and she somehow either needing his help or just getting all weak in the loins and spreading her legs for the “romantic reconciliation”, before he begins being a POS to her again. Oh yes, the title and the back cover synopsis spoil the fact she’d get knocked up, but this happens late in the story when the author has run out of ideas to explain why Lydia isn’t running away as fast as she could from that despicable douchebag.

The heartbreaking tragedy here is that aside from her incurable open-leg-itis disease for Alex, Lydia is a refreshingly sensible and pragmatic heroine. She gets her life together fine, she can make rational decisions for anything that isn’t attached to that twatwaffle douchenozzle, and she even holds herself just fine against people that want to knock her down a peg.

If anything, Alex’s presence in her life is the main cause of a lot of the headaches that she encounters in her day to day business, because the author just has to introduce a vile woman that is jealous of Lydia getting to sleep with Alex.

I don’t know why the author does this. Is such a thing supposed to increase the sex appeal of the hero? If anything, I feel that that lady and the turd nugget belong together and they should go have a lovely honeymoon on a leaking boat.

Now, a cruel hero can work if the author had the hero do a major grovel at the end after experiencing a glorious epiphany about what a gaping pus-filled asshole that he is. That or the chemistry between the hero and the heroine is so off the charts that the whole trashy, dysfunctional result is a glorious train wreck to behold and enjoy.

Here, though, the author tells more than shows, so I hardly get any insight into the hero’s head, and when I do, he comes off as a POS. As a result, the turd nugget behaves hot and cold to the heroine and this makes him come off as bipolar and unhinged.

There is zero chemistry between him and Lydia, there is no glorious grovel, so this thing ends up being a tragic story of a smart and capable romance heroine that should have known better than to let the hero play cruel games on her again and again. The whole sordid ordeal makes for a rather depressing read.