Tanya Wilde, $0.99, ISBN 979-8201279677
Historical Romance, 2021

Wolfstan Robert Ward, Earl of Wicke and Selborne, is rather vexed. 

You see, his cousin Langley is mad about babies and wants to have some of his own, so he’s hitting the marriage mart and getting all the ladies sighing because a man that adores babies is just too irresistible. 

Wolfstan, of course, is more interested in the process of making babies than babies themselves, and he’s having the time of his life, thank you, until he hears that Rebecca Flowerdy has heard of Langley’s I-want-babies crusade. She has a crush on that fellow, so right now she’s probably dashing to find Langley to let him know that she will be the willing and able bearer of his babies.

Our hero wants her too, of course, but he’s 1,000,000% confident that she doesn’t want him, but he’s also her protector to make sure that if he couldn’t shag her, no one can she wouldn’t run afoul of womanizing fiends and we all know that a man that wants a wife and a family is the worst of those fiends.

Rebecca, naturally has been smitten with Wolfstan instead, ever since she was nine. I’m not sure enduring or true one’s affections could ever be when they were nine, but hey, we all know the wiring of the brain of a romance heroine can be truly special. 

Oh, and she also owns a gambling hell, in secret of course.

Because of this, she is convinced that she can never, ever tell Wolfstan that she wants him to cash his chips inside her.

Anyway, all three of them end up in the same party in the same place, and Wolfstan is going to give Rebecca Three Kisses Before Christmas to convince her that he is indeed the one for her.

Really? Is this the kind of message the author wants to tell us impressionable romance readers out there?

Just three freaking kisses?

What, have diamond rings and other expensive gifts run out of fashion?

Throw in meddling secondary characters that practically push the heroine onto the hero’s throbbing member and I get a story about two people that could use a hard knock in the back of their heads to get them to see sense than true love.

Tanya Wilde’s narrative has a nice, bouncy cadence that makes this story an easy, pleasant read, but the story, while isn’t a long one, feels interminable to finish because Rebecca and Wolfstan just keep finding silly reasons to prolong the story.

Oh, he wants her but he can’t tell her, until he does, but then he can’t really go through with it because he feels inferior compared to Langley. Given that he wouldn’t even do anything had he not been convinced that Langley will get to her, his “love” already feels more like a mix of jealousy and covetousness—if his peen can’t tap that, no man’s will, that kind of thing.

So, to have him then lead her on only to then disengage later makes him appear to be quite the jerk, and no amount of the author’s insincere “But this hot, handsome, well-debauched man that has women throwing at him all day long really, really, really deep down feels like he’s not man enough for Rebecca!” can convince me otherwise.

Meanwhile, Rebecca comes off as a fickle, silly creature with bizarre motivations and thought processes. Nothing about her screams someone that can and will run a gambling hell well. The author claims that Rebecca’s business partner does all the actual work, so by right there’s really no reason why our heroine just won’t ditch that one right away for that peen that she has been super hungry for since she was nine. Don’t look at me like that, okay—I’m not the one that wrote about how the hero and the heroine had been horny for one another since she was that age.

Anyway, the heroine’s excuses not to start boinking the hero are as flimsy as his for not boinking her ASAP. 

Hence, while this is a readable story, it is also a somewhat painful one for me to read, due to how this is just a flimsy tale of nothing-burgers stretched out as long as it is because the two main characters are mentally deficient. That it takes secondary characters to actually make them get back together is only confirmation that these two main characters need to grow up a lot more before I can buy their happily ever after.