Avon, $6.99, ISBN 0-06-009266-1
Historical Romance, 2003
Sequel to Scandalous Again. Read the review to figure out why the heroine of One Kiss From You, Eleanor de Lacy, is posing as her cousin Madeline in London. I don’t want to repeat it, instead I want whatever Ms Dodd is happily tippling when she comes up with the really ridiculous premise of this two-book series.
This book has the author’s trademark hard-hearted hero with a secret agenda. The problem is, when one pairs a hard-hearted hero and a heroine who isn’t already behaving anything close to rational behavior thanks to the premise of the plot, it is hard to stop seeing a train wreck in my mind. In this book, Eleanor hopes that she can just bat her eyelashes and stall Madeline’s intended (that has won Madeline in a card game – oh just read the review of the other book) until Madeline has her problems sorted out in Scandalous Again. Unfortunately, Remington Knight will not be stopped. He sticks to Eleanor like sweat on skin, insists that she follows him everywhere so that he can show her around like a new pet chihuahua, and even more annoyingly, he wants to get married ASAP. And Eleanor, being Eleanor, finds that being imprisoned and tailed by a psycho suitor very much to her liking, so much so that she is soon bestowing the secrets of the harem that she has learned (don’t ask) on Remington here.
The bulk of the story sees Eleanor growing into her role as a future duchess, but the author spends so much time and space trying to justify why no one will see through Eleanor’s ruse that everything else about the story suffers from neglect. Remington is a typical arrogant tumescence while Eleanor comes off as a scatterbrained sort that cannot think straight when she’s being pushed around by Remington. The author’s attempt to make her story halfway plausible by piling on more plot contrivances or implausible coincidences only makes the story even messier than ever.
The sex scenes, as always, are hot, but other than that, One Kiss From You has very little to offer the reader. Maybe next time the author should think of something more down-to-earth than this Ex-Harem Girl Regency Heroines Trading Spaces thing. At the rate things are going, even the Pregnant Single Mother Siamese Twins Baby Swap at Maternity Ward thing will sound good in comparison.
