The Lady Reina of Clydon is in a pickle. Her father has perished in the Crusades, leaving her immensely wealthy, and without a husband. This means that any man who weds her will get all of her holdings. She is desperate to find a husband suitable to her, but she is besieged (literally) by prospective suitors. Her castle is under attack and is about to fall when lo! out of the blue an army (led by the brutishly handsome Ranulf Fitz Hugh) scares off the attacking hoard. Lady Reina welcomes her rescuers into the keep, but is astonished when her guests spirit her off into the night to deliver her to their employer as his new bride! Reina convinces Ranulf to wed her instead, and almost before the reader knows it, they're married! Ranulf takes her to the marriage bed and almost before Reina knows it, her wedding night is over! They fight, they bicker, he has a tragic past filled with child abuse and skanky ladies murdering his illegitimate children, she just wants to be pleased sexually, they discover oral sex, Ranulf reunites with his father and discovers that the skanky lady got married to an uggo, Reina gets preggo, and they live happily ever after.
Alrighty. There are a couple things that struck me about this book. Let's do a list!
1) Reina has a gay best friend! He is her chambermaid, they talk about men and sex, he hits on Ranulf... Guys, it's like Sex and the City! NO. This book is set during the Crusades. I feel like that is a little too early for the whole gay best friend thing to have been a thing. Didn't they burn people at the stake for sodomy back then?
2) Ranulf has a problem with premature ejaculation. Apparently he ruts like a rabbit and pays no attention to his partners wants or desires, and then finishes way too fast. This is never a good thing, especially not in a romance novel.
3) Aside from his little "problem," Ranulf's excuse for not pleasuring his new bride? He's afraid he's going to hurt her. So he goes to a prostitute to ask for advice about pleasuring women and LO AND BEHOLD she tells him about oral sex and he is like "Is that even a thing?" but he does it and TA DAH! it works. His reaction was pretty much my own - did they even have oral sex back in the day? But I mean, if they had sodomy, then I guess non-procreative sex was also probably around.
4) And after all this the author wants us to believe that he gets lots of women and that they follow him around. Not with moves like those, bro.
5) ...And she gets pregnant. Just once, ONCE I want a historical romance novel where the heroine doesn't get pregs right away. Because that always leads to extra angst about "Oh will he still love me?" and "Now he won't make love to me!" and "He has daddy issues so he will hate our child!" Stupid historical women.
But what I DID like was that Reina took things into her own hands. She manipulated her way out of a bad situation into a better one where she was married to someone closer to her age, who was super handsome instead of an old dude who was going to have her kidnapped. So she was fairly smart. Also, apparently her boobs weren't that big. Hey, variety is the spice of life, right?
Stay tuned for the next installment (a double feature) - Fires of Winter and Hearts Aflame.
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