I’m so close to giving this five stars. I’m honestly not sure what’s holding me back. I had such a fun time reading this book! I borrowed the e-book version from my library and read it in a browser, and now I’m upset that all my bookmarks are going to go away. I never bookmark pages in a romance! (Okay, well, I never bookmark pages in a romance because I like the prose. I quite frequently bookmark the sexy parts for future reference.)
But dangit, I was just so charmed by Chase’s writing. I guess there’s a reason her books are so popular. This was the opposite of a generic reading experience.
I don’t even normally like alphahole heroes! I much prefer my romance heroes to be emotionally open and nice people. And Dain is like, the king of the alphaholes. Well, sort of. On the outside he is a huge jerk. On the inside he’s still a lonely little boy whose mother left him and whose father made him think he was the ugly spawn of the devil. Frankly, it’s amazing he turned out as well as he did. I didn’t even mind the cliché of it all, because it was so well done. Also, Chase’s heroine, Jessica, was the perfect antidote. She did not let him get away with anything. I very, very much enjoyed her as a heroine.
Also, there were several points in the book where I could feel it falling in to a couple of tropes and I thought it was going a certain direction, and then Jessica all by her self yanked the book in a different direction, and I was just like, Oh!
I haven’t read a romance novel that was written before 2005 in a long time, so I was half expecting it to turn into a dated cringefest, but this book very, very much holds up for having been written in 1995, when romance novels were a very different species. I am now very excited to dive into Chase’s entire back catalog.
[4.5 stars]