Spencer & Co Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 978-0645632217
Historical Romance, 2022

In Alivia Fleur’s Tryst With a Viscount, Lillian Morris is feeling down. As the daughter of a not-at-all-wealthy family, she is to be married off to Viscount Pemberton.

It wasn’t so much his age—Lillian had seen younger maids marry older men and been doted upon. Nor was it his rotund stature. And while his complexion took on a reddish hue after his fourth port, he was a picture of health during the day. These things were inconsequential to Lillian if a man was good. But Viscount Pemberton openly boasted of having multiple mistresses and, when not in their bedrooms, spent all his time playing cards or at the races.

Let’s be real here. The guy having a hundred mistresses and spending his entire day drinking and whoring has never stopped any virtuous romance heroine from breathlessly putting out ten seconds into the first meeting. No, it’s the fact that Pemberton is old and red and fat.

The author isn’t fooling me one bit, because I’ve been around as a romance reader!

Her BFF tells her to go give herself to some other guy.

‘You have always been frightfully good. You deserve better than a man like that. He will take everything from you. Why give him your virtue? Keep a piece of yourself from him. Then, when his lordship has you flat on your back with his horrendous self pumping away, you can close your eyes and think of a better man. Maybe someone like…’ Dudley scanned the room, then gave a nod toward the stairs. ‘Someone like him.’

Huxley is, of course hot.

An unruly jet-black fringe framed his face. Clean shaved with a firm jaw. Dark eyes. Broad chested and tall. He wore a dinner suit as dark as his locks, with a crisp white shirt and a straight black bowtie. One hand rested on the banister as he surveyed the ballroom. Lillian’s stomach flickered, and a warmth blossomed in her chest. The man was an Adonis.

See what I mean about romance heroines willing to drop their bloomers and put out to any random hot guy?

If the author’s intention all along were to get me to feel sorry for Viscount Pemberton, she’s doing a spectacular job.

So, in the end, she shags Huxley, and he wants to marry her, and in a roundabout way, she ends up getting a hot guy and a lot of money by indiscriminately putting out to some random guy she barely knows. It’s like a prostitute that somehow accidentally gets paid for her services.

The writing is clean, so there’s one saving grace about this thing, I suppose.

On the whole, though, this one is not erotic enough to be a hot read, and it barely qualifies as a romance. On top of that, while I’m all for DTF heroines, this one has a premise that is utterly daft from the get go.