Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-91722-2
Historical Romance, 2016
The Reluctant Viscount is actually Lara Temple’s second published effort with this line, and it’s a somewhat step up from her debut effort. However, the characters all behave in a repetitive one-note manner and quickly become a parody of their archetypes pretty quickly.
Some years ago, Alyssa Drake and Adam Alistair may be heading toward a thing, until her cousin ruined his reputation and eventually sent him packing from Polite Society.
Our heroine bases everything in her life that comes after this traumatic event on that particular event. Hence, when he finally shows up in town again, she wastes little time doing what romance heroines love to do at the start of historical romances set in 19th century: she visits the hero at his home all alone and unchaperoned.
Wait, put away the burning brand, people, our heroine isn’t a harlot. She will wait a bit first before she has unprotected sex out of wedlock with the hero, as all proper and virtuous women do in this kind of stories.
You see, his cousin is being all the hot dandy rage in town, and her cousin—a different one—is besotted with him. Alyssa, however, knows that her brother has Mary’s pure honey pot all reserved for his spoon, so she feels obligated to make sure that Mary will not be led astray by men that aren’t her brother.
Therefore, she asks him to help get his cousin off hers so that her brother can eventually wed and mount this cousin of theirs.
Wait, is everyone related to everyone else in this story? Maybe that explains the one-note repetitive behavior displayed by these people.
If Alyssa’s bizarre attitude toward her cousins feels very “keep it in the family please”, it’s explained that she’s just being a nagging control freak, sorry, “someone that cared too much” as the author would describe her. However, she will also break down in tears when she thinks about how she can never be what Adam needs, so I suspect that there’s something wrong with the wiring in her head that makes her so overwrought. Are her parents related, or even siblings perhaps?
Meanwhile, Adam had been betrayed by her cousin—remember, that’s another one, not Mary, and oh my god, how many cousins are there chasing after one another?—so perhaps he can be excused for being a petulant, whiny, snippy “I am hurt so I now behave like a petty teenage boy because that is sexy! Womp womp!” type, but honestly, his antics feel more childish than sympathetic or bad-boy charming, and the whole Viscount Adam Emostank act gets old very fast.
These two characters are trapped in a circular pattern of her basically clinging on to his sleeve and making “You! Must! Do! This! For! Me!” claims, him being all snippy and rude in response, she feels hurt and eventually gets all overwrought about how his peen shall never touch her in-between, insert raging tears here, and repeat and rinse.
This pattern especially hurts because it doesn’t allow the two characters to show much emotional or romantic tenderness to convince me that there is genuinely some chemistry between them. They are so antagonistic, and he is such a brat and she is a few steps away from a nervous breakdown, so there’s not much love for me to enjoy reading about here.
Instead, the author relies on these two characters having something in the past to sell me the romance. Even then, I feel that this so-called infatuation is far more on Alyssa’s side than his. Still, she does get to ride on his train all the way out of the story in her happily ever after, so maybe that still counts as a win.
The late third or so of the story could have been used to develop the romance better, but no, the author decides to add in a spectacularly ordinary and forgettable subplot about someone wanting to be rid of Adam.
In the end, this story feels one note and the romance, or whatever that is, never feels developed enough to be credible or believable. This one is better off being a cautionary tale of the effects of inbreeding on one’s intellectual capacity, for what that’s worth!
