Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-92597-5
Historical Romance, 2017

You’d think I’d know enough to take the title of Meriel Fuller’s The Warrior’s Damsel in Distress as a warning, but you know me. I am not a superficial person, and I know better than to judge a book by its title or cover.

Serves me right, then, I suppose, as I’m now paying the price of my magnanimity.

Bruin, Count of Valkenborg, somehow has no idea that his supposedly dying twin brother had carved wealth and power by grabbing properties that lack a lord and have only hapless widows and daughters running the show. So, when Steffen mutters the Lady of Striguil in his supposed dying wails, our hero takes it upon himself to bring that lady to his brother.

The lady in question is actually a victim of Steffen’s rapacious greed, although since she’s the heroine, somehow she manages to escape that man with her virginity intact. Hey, don’t laugh, as only virgins deserve love! We should be thankful that Steffen thoughtfully forgot to rape her, because the most important thing here is that she gets to bestow her virginity to her true love. Only then will the world be a beautiful and just place.

Anyway, our heroine is now Eva Macmurrough, nursemaid to the kids of Lady Katherine, her BFF. When Bruin shows up looking for Lady of Striguil, our heroine gives the game away by taking one look at him, mistaking him for Steffen, and fleeing hysterically while making enough noise to draw his attention to her. She’s also conveniently wearing white so that there’s no missing the sight of her noisily fleeing the scene like a squealing wild boar on a clumsy rampage.

Thus, our heroine basically hands her derriere to the hero on a silver platter. He basically kidnaps her in order to force her to come along, and she learns that he’s not his twin brother.

Immediately, she gets the horny feelings for him in such an abrupt and forced manner that I can only scratch my head in befuddlement. She’s manhandled, locked in, and kept a prisoner by a man that looks so much like the tormentor in her past, but oh, look at her, she’s horny falling for her true love. This leads to her sassing him like a modern day lady, maybe because the author wants me to view Eva as a medieval romance heroine that is also enlightened and what not. Of course, this is all an illusion: the only reason she hadn’t been whipped for sassing off is because the hero is too wrapped up in himself most of the time.

That’s only with the hero, though. If I have a word to describe Eva, it’s overwrought. Maximum overwrought, actually, because aside from wearing white and running away screaming like some woman in a B-grade horror movie, our heroine has a pattern of flying off the handle at any hint of stress and drama. She will jump to the worst conclusions at the drop of the Mad Hatter’s hat, shriek and wail when prudence would be the best course of action, and generally acts like a hysterical loony at the brink of a nervous breakdown.

Now, you may say, given her predicament, she has the right to be hysterical. However, the fact that she can get all horny for the hero and sass him at the same time makes it hard for me to take her predicament seriously. Our heroine is a damsel in distress, but that’s because she makes it so easy for her to be one. She keeps doing and saying stupid things to bring attention to herself, and when she could have escaped, she comes up with dumb excuses to stay put.

My favorite excuse is that Bruin has promised her that he would protect her from his brother. Yet, at the slightest provocation later on, she starts wailing on him that he has promised, promised, so how dare he!

Well, she knows that he’s Steffen’s twin brother. So why is she shocked that he may like his twin brother better than her? My god, how stupid is this woman?

Bruin is a genius compared to Eva, but he spends his entire story moping about how he’s responsible for some woman’s death. Oh, he does a bad thing? That’s bad, yeah, but did you know that he once caused this woman’s death, so woo, he is so sad and edgy? Oh, he screws up? Dead woman, so readers, the author will bring that up over and over and over because, I don’t know, maybe I’m supposed to accept that the hero doesn’t need to be held accountable for his actions because he is so guilt-ridden?

Later on, he has an earth-shattering crisis. How could he bring this lovely woman to his awful evil brother? Okay, he has every opportunity to change his mind about this, but hey, it’s more dramatic, I guess, for him to commit to the act and then wail that he feels so guilty about failing yet another woman once the crap hits the fan. God, this man is just so tiresome to follow. If Eva had been a squealing wild boar with its tail on fire, Bruin is a bleating sheep that whines about the same old tedious crap over and over.

Oh, and in the end, a convenient plot development best described as a super rock hard turd painfully expelled from a bleeding orifice plops out to absolve the hero completely of all his guilt about that dead woman. So, all that tedious bleating is for nothing, thanks a lot.

Ultimately, this is a story that ends up being as long and painfully melodramatic as it is because the hero and the heroine are both imbeciles competing to see who is the most melodramatic moron in the land. I end up rooting for Steffen, of all things, because as vile as he is, he’s the only one with a halfway functional brain.

Anyway, this story is one hot mess turd… or is it one hot turd mess? It doesn’t matter, because whichever it is, the wound it has inflicted on my brain remains equally severe.