Sally Paul is down to her last penny. She decides to spend it on a cup of tea before the inevitable workhouse. Her job prospects are few and the last potential job is gone with the woman who died before she could take up her post. The last thing she expects is an offer of marriage from Admiral Sir Charles Bright whose prospective wife hasn't arrived. He needs to stave off his sisters and a marriage to convenience suits him. She has some secrets that will cause issues (that are resolved a little quickly) but overall it was an interesting read. ( )

The retired admiral marries a woman he meets in a cafe, in order to get his sisters off his back. The woman chooses him over her only other alternative, the workhouse. It is supposed to be a marriage of convenience, but the two become attached and their future together looks promising until they are confronted by a disaster from the woman's past. The admiral's behaviour is absolutely appalling. I wonder how so volatile and impulsive a man managed to command the entire British fleet! ( )

Nice regency somewhat spoiled by insufficient grovelling at the end. This was a nice different type of story about a 45 year old retired admiral who impulsively marries a destitute woman. Full of lovely dialog and good scenes of them getting to know each other. It was ruined for me by the ending, where the hero, who owes the heroine a massive apology gets off basically scot free. The hero finds out something bad about the heroine, refuses to listen to her defense, throws a glass paperweight at her narrowly missing her head and shouts at her to get out. After all that when he finally finds her again after months she has decided to forgive him and they fall into each others arms. We read about his remorse but we see no scenes from her for 5 months while he searches for her. Whatever mental stuff she went through happened off the page and when he finds her again she just forgives him and all is hunky dory. I want to see a hero who has been such a shit do some major grovelling. Dropped the book from 4-1/2 stars down to 3 stars for me. ( )

Before getting to the last 20% or so of the book, my rating was teetering between two and three stars. I liked some aspects of the book: the leads aren't young things, and the author addresses antisemitism. And then everything kind of blew up at the end of the book.

To be sure, I felt a little skeeved out by Charles when he was commenting about "The Mouse," the spinster he had intended to marry for convenience before she stood him up (presumably) and he stumbled upon Sally. He kept talking down about her age (although she was younger than him by several years) and her looks (she wasn't hot enough for him, apparently). That's not something that I want to read in a romance book, you know? Don't tear down other women to build up how special the heroine is, thanks.

Eventually, Charles discovers that Sally has been less than forthcoming about her past. She was married to a man who was framed for a notorious case of food poisoning that killed numerous soldiers, and she didn't tell him that. And Charles...reacts incredibly badly.

He throws a paperweight at Sally's head. He freely admits a few pages later that it would have cracked her skull had it hit her. It leaves a dent in the door, and she's standing so close by that she is showered with broken glass from the paperweight. Some shards even puncture the skin around her mouth - she was THAT CLOSE.

But even after Charles does this, he sees himself as the "wronged party" FOREVER. Sally also sees him as the wronged party - she leaves in the night, begging his forgiveness and never seeming to think that he should maybe apologize for almost killing her. Instead, she tells him that she'll love him forever after he nearly killed her, and then she apparently sits around for a while, waiting for Charles to find her.

When they're finally reunited, we learn that Sally is pregnant. That's the catalyst that brings them together with no more problems or NEEDED TALKS about his violence and how he can't freaking throw things at her head that may kill her, you know?

It makes me feel like this isn't a HEA at all, because I could completely see this devolving into a horribly abusive relationship quickly. No thanks. ( )

It was hard for me to write this post. I consider this an okay book, and I thought the main characters made great friends, but I didn't really feel the romance.

I'll guess I'll start off with one of the first things I noticed as I began reading the book: the cover is completely wrong. Unless that's supposed to be Sophie and her previous husband, the Harlequin art department goofed up by not even flipping the image so that it's the guy's right hand showing. Instead, we get a good view of his perfect, non-amputated left hand. I mean, come on, it's mentioned early on that Admiral Bright has a hook for a left hand.

Once I got to the hook bit, I started wondering where Kelly was planning to go with it. I had never even thought of Regency-era prostheses before - surely people didn't actually wear hooks? I was looking forward to a good "penniless woman enters into a marriage of convenience" story, but I wasn't sure I liked the idea of the hero and his hook hand being turned into a joke.

I've never read a contemporary romance in which the hero has a prosthesis, but Kelly writes about Bright's hook the way I imagine a prosthesis would be handled in a contemporary romance. Bright worries that Sophie may be disgusted by his hook and handless arm and is happy to learn that, right from the start, Sophie doesn't mind it one bit. Because Kelly doesn't treat the hook as a throwaway physical detail, it has an effect on what Bright can and cannot physically do (he can't hold a cup of tea in his right hand and open Sophie's door with the other, because his hook can't turn the knob), and the hook must be taken into account during sex scenes (no, nothing kinky, it's just that it needs to be taken off so no one gets stabbed).

Kelly even tries to incorporate the hook into what I assume were supposed to be early romantic moments, such as the bit where Bright twirls a lock of Sophie's hair around his hook and, instead of pulling away, Sophie helps him. That didn't really fly with me, because I couldn't help but wonder if Sophie had ever dealt with someone with a prosthesis before (the questions she asked him indicated to me that the answer was probably "no"), and then I wondered if there shouldn't be at least a little awkwardness on her part. Sophie is never awkward about Bright's hook at all - all the awkwardness is on Bright's part, as he wonders if she really means it when she says his hook doesn't bother her.

As I mentioned in my post about Julia Quinn's When He Was Wicked, I'm not a huge fan of romance novels that star widows or widowers. If the back of this book had mentioned that Sophie is a widow, I might not have picked it up. If it had also mentioned that Sophie had had a young son who died not long after her husband, I would have avoided the book like the plague. As it was, I cringed when these details came up. Although it seemed odd and possibly a little unrealistic that Sophie didn't grieve more for her husband and son in the book, I was willing to accept that the passage of time had softened her grief and that she was too practical to let grief keep her from continuing to live. I was happy Kelly didn't feel the need to force readers to slog through pages of grief and guilt.

So, the hook and widow aspects were done reasonably well - it just took a while for me to be sure they weren't going to turn me away from the book. What carried me through my initial doubts about this book were Sophie and Bright's early conversations. They got along extremely well, and it showed in the way they talked to each other. They clicked so well conversationally that it didn't seem so much a stretch for them to agree to a marriage of convenience, despite them not knowing much about each other.

I could imagine Sophie and Bright becoming friends, and, once they were married, I could imagine that friendship warming up a bit into something sexual, because it had been a while since either of them had had sex. The problem was, I really couldn't feel the romance in this book. I can't quite put my finger on why, either.

Maybe I'm too young for the characters? I can't remember if Sophie's exact age is ever mentioned, but she's old enough to have been married and have had a young child, but young enough to get pregnant again (a bit of a spoiler, but it shouldn't come as too much of a shock, what with all the mentions of "our children" before Sophie and Bright even think about having sex with each other). I was guessing late 20s, early 30s for her. I know Bright's exact age was mentioned, although I can't find it in the book right now. He's 46, I believe. Both of them are well out of the giddy first romance stage, but I know I've read other romance novels with older main characters who came across as more romantic than this couple.

Maybe there weren't enough scenes that felt romantic to me? Both Sophie and Bright have moments when they have warm, fuzzy feelings for each other - one of my favorites is when Sophie describes the little details that tell her Bright is in a good mood, details that make it seem like she's been married to him for years, even though she's only known him for three days - but... I don't know how to describe it. I'm sure there are people out there who have read or will read this book who'll disagree with me. As much as I enjoyed many of Sophie and Bright's scenes together, they just didn't click with me as a romantic couple. There was nothing in the book that put a silly grin on my face or made my heart go warm and mushy. Bright, in particular, did nothing for me as a romantic hero.

Although I'd say I enjoyed the book overall, it was an uneven read for me. I really liked the beginning, when Bright and Sophie first met, Sophie accepted his offer, and Sophie arrived at Bright's home. Again, just like I wondered if Bright's hook would be turned into a joke, I wondered if the pornographic house and lawn decorations would lead into a goofy rest of the book. That didn't turn out the be the case. The house's interesting history gave Kelly the opportunity to introduce a few characters I assume she intended for readers to see as quirky (seeing as one of them had intended to rape Sophie, I don't care if he was in his eighties, he was just creepy).

After a reasonably strong beginning, Bright and Sophie go visit their neighbors for help getting the staff necessary to turn their home into something less embarrassing, and every single visit turns out to be emotionally devastating in some way. They turn out to be their elderly Jewish neighbors' first visitors in 30 years. Then their other neighbor turns out to be connected to a painful part of Bright's past. As if Bright and Sophie's niceness and kindness hadn't already been underscored enough, Sophie insists that they hire on a few people she met while job-hunting at the beginning of the book, including, to name a few, a jobless governess, and a little girl who not only doesn't have a real name (her name is Twenty) but who was also being physically and sexually abused by her former employer. It got to the point where I felt like saying, "Enough already, I get that Sophie and Bright are the nicest of the nice people and better than anyone else."

Thankfully, the seemingly unending examples of Sophie and Bright's goodness finally let up. The more romantic aspects of the book got into full swing - as I've already mentioned, they didn't do much for me. I ended up being more curious to see how things would turn out with respect to the secret Sophie was keeping from Bright. As far as that went, I was not happy with how Bright reacted to learning about Sophie's secret. As he himself later thought, he could have hurt her badly. He didn't, but he could have. I also thought it was a bit out of character for Bright to have fallen apart so much after Sophie left - I had considered him a fairly practical person who would have been more believable if he had concentrated single-mindedly on finding Sophie again, rather than closing himself up in his wine cellar and drinking himself stupid.

Overall, I'm not sorry I read this, but I don't think it'll ever be a reread for me. I do think I'd probably pick up another one of Kelly's book's if I saw one I thought might appeal to me, just to see if I'd end up liking it more.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )