Avon Impulse, $5.99, ISBN 978-0-06-238051-7
Historical Romance, 2015
You all know that I believe in equal opportunities. But I always have reservations about letting the mentally handicapped run wild, unsupervised, and worse, letting men stick it to her when she seems barely able to do basic sums. With this being a romance, I suppose it’s a given that Rafe Danvers, our devilish hero in question, would take care of Hedley Sinclair for all time, but I can only hope she doesn’t outlive him, as I’m certain she would find a way to accidentally get crushed to death by his coffin during the funeral procession.
Mind you, I’d be thrilled if Hedley dies and even more if I get to have the front row seat to watch the whole thing, but she’d undoubtedly pop out a brat every year after the happy ending. Her death would leave the poor kids all alone… I’m overthinking all this, am I not?
Hedley Sinclair is the black sheep of her family. The women in her family are all greedy, evil, scheming creatures – in this story, it’s hard to avoid noticing that the women are predominantly cast in negative light – but Hedley is different. She is selfless, beautiful, and is all about having a family of her own. Therefore, when she inherits a run-down property called Greyson Park, much to the disgust of her mother (long story, don’t ask), she decides to go ahead and live there. Alone. Without any funds. The food supply is low, she has no wood for the coming winter, but hey, she’d still feed anyone and anything that comes her way nonetheless. She also spends her days and nights in back-breaking labor trying to get the whole place in order.
Rafe Danvers is not happy that another Sinclair woman has claims on the property he assumes to be rightly his. You see, her sister dumped him, and he still holds a grudge. But that grudge is nothing compared to his ire when he discovers that he’d paid Hedley’s mother a large amount of money for Greyson Park, only to have Hedley now claiming that she has the deed to the place. Has he been fleeced again by the Sinclair women?
Now, if Rafe wants Hedley out of that place, all he needs to do is to wait it out a few more weeks. That wretch would no doubt show up dead soon enough, either having starved or being frozen to death. Of course, since she’s the designated vagina for life for Rafe, he has to stick around and ends up cleaning up her mess despite his reservations. Oh, and there is supposed to be a treasure in the place somewhere, so Hedley’s sister (the same one that dumped Rafe) and her new husband would show up to cause trouble. Naturally, Hedley needs Rafe’s help to deal with those two. Hedley’s entire personality, IQ, and supreme worthlessness can be summed up in this scene, in which she tells Rafe what she thinks about the hidden treasure:
“I have no interest in it. All I want is to live in Greyson Park in peace. I don’t want to see my home destroyed because of their greed.”
Let’s see – she needs money to restore the place, hell, to feed herself. If she indeed has the deed to the place as she claims, then the treasure could very well be hers, for her to sell off and use the money to make her life all beautiful. But no, such a course of action is greed. She wants to live in peace! God, I wish the entire building collapses on her so that she can, indeed, be both in peace and pieces forever and ever.
Oh, and yes, she remains in the house when it’s being torn down, forcing the hero to come to a desperate rescue. Even late in the story, she can’t show a halfway decent speck of intelligence or self preservation.
I don’t know what the author is thinking – it’s terrifying but perhaps she really does believe that such shockingly moronic heroines are cute and adorable – but I can’t think from all the blinding rage I am feeling after finishing The Devilish Mr. Danvers. My brain has completely melted into goo. I have to give it to the author, though – she’s definitely showing that she’s unbeatable when it comes to churning up heroes and especially heroines who could drive my blood pressure up with each word they utter. Maybe it’s all a conspiracy – she is part of a plot to drive me insane, a Hitchcock-style grand plan to get back at me for all the things I’ve said about the genre! Oh, someone write me that book, it’d be much more interesting than this one.
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