Title: My Fair Lover
Author: Nicole Jordan
Series: Legendary Lovers #5
Got halfway, decided I had better things to do
I would like to thank Nicole Jordan, Ballantine Books/Penguin Random House, and NetGalley for allowing me to read an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I didn’t finish the book. I started it two weeks ago (three weeks ago? I don’t remember) and kept telling myself I needed to read it and get it over with (not what a reader should think, huh?), so yesterday I picked it up again and tried to get into it, but I couldn’t. I was just about halfway, trudging along, when I suddenly thought—I don’t have time to read a story about characters I couldn’t care less about. So, I stopped.
It may not be fair to judge a book I didn’t read in its entirety, but I figure an error can only be corrected if it’s known that an error occurred. If I just shrug off the book, I feel like I’m taking the publisher’s ARC for granted and not being a productive member of the NetGalley community. So, for what it’s worth, here’s what I thought of the almost-half I read.
The plot’s simple enough—two old flames reignite after years apart. I didn’t have a problem with the basic premise itself… I was more exasperated by the characters, particularly the hero, and the choices they made. I felt Brandon Deverill was an insufferably selfish, arrogant prick. And Kate…*sigh* Conceptually, Kate Wilde was a great heroine, except her personality and professed attitudes were rather contrary to her actions, and I became impatient with her.
So they knew each other as late teens/young adults, like eighteen or twenty, and spent some time together. She developed a major crush on him, thought she loved him—but the war (of 1812, I believe) comes between them, sending him home to fight as an American. The night before he was to leave, she made a desperate attempt to demonstrate how much she loved him—by stripping down and climbing into his bed, ready and willing. With honorable intentions, he rejects her, obliterating her pride and her heart with a few simple words. She vows to get over the SOB, and he goes off to war.
Six years pass. The war’s over, and Deverill, despite being American, has inherited a title in England (I never did understand how that happened; admittedly it may have been a part I skipped because I was bored.) In order to become a proper English gentleman and gain the respect of society, he needed an advantageous marriage. Kate, as it happens, is something of a successful matchmaker, so she’s asked to set him up. When she meets him again, she realizes she’s just as in love with/turned on by him as ever, and she’s determined to ignore her feelings because, last she knew, he didn’t want anything more from her than casual friendship. Deverill, on the other hand, decides this is his opportunity to be with Kate after saving her virtue six years ago and thinking about her every moment since.
Sounds solid, right? Logically, Deverill would ascertain her availability, apologize, and announce his intentions to court her with the object of marriage. She’d have rejected him in turn, of course, but if handled with maturity and a bit of perseverance on his part, I am 100% certain she’d have come around and they’d have lived happily ever after.
But that would have been faaaaaar too easy and rational. Instead, while Kate tries to ignore her attraction to him—as anyone would; fool me once and all that—and match him with an ideal bride, Brandon begins to scheme. See, he can’t simply apologize and try to move forward, saving everyone time and effort. No, he doesn’t believe he’s capable of love, because of some crap about his parents’ marriage being a cold business arrangement—somehow he got it in his head that he’d inherited their coldness… I don’t know, it was really stupid. But because he doesn’t think he can love her, he knows he’s not good enough for her—but he still wants her and only her. I don’t know why; I can only guess he figures she’s hot, they’re already acquainted, and she’s advantageously positioned in society, so why not?
Wait, excuse me, it’s NOT about convenience. He even says so himself: “You would hardly be convenient.”
Except…in the same paragraph he concludes: “And in some ways, you would be the easiest choice for my bride. For one thing, you could effortlessly assume the role of my baroness.”
No, she was not convenient at all.
So he creates this game for himself, one where he’s the only player and there are no rules. The goal: to win Kate (ie, get her to marry him). He ferrets out information through conversation and learns that romance is important to her and she won’t marry for anything less than true love. That doesn’t help his goal, so he ignores her wishes and does his best to seduce her, because she’d pant at his heels once she’d had a taste of his prowess. Yeah, essentially, he tries to get her to marry his dick. Then he’d have her, just like he wanted, never mind all that love crap she’s always spewing. But Kate spits out that taste of prowess—thank god—and insists she wants his love, not just sex. So he finally resigns himself to the whole love thing, because at that point, his entire focus is getting in her pants. Or under her chemise, as it were.
He laments society’s double standard for men and women regarding casual sex, though only because it’s cock-blocking him. At the same time, he expects sex to make her fall in love with him, though he’s never loved anyone he’s had sex with, creating his own double standard regarding sex. Do you see what I mean about the selfishness and arrogance?
That’s where I stopped, so I’m not sure how it ended up, and honestly I don’t care. His ego was suffocating me. And unfortunately, Kate wasn’t blameless. I know I made it sound as though she stood her ground and held firm conviction in her beliefs, and she did…sometimes. Like I said, Kate seemed to have the right attitude, but her actions often contradicted it. Though she was determined to resist him at the beginning, when she thought he didn’t care about her, she sure didn’t seem to try very hard. She was ready to make babies as soon as he kissed her, she missed him with complete preoccupation when he was away, and got into cat fights when other women showed interest in him.
But before all that, I have a hard time believing that a heroine as supposedly strong, driven, and independent as Kate would forsake all other relationships after he rejected her. It’s self-defeating and incongruous with her personality. A strong, driven, independent woman who values love and romance would have had a good cry, maybe wallowed in self-pity for a couple weeks, then she’d have picked herself up and moved on with another heart-melting gentleman far sooner than six years. She might have always loved Deverill in one small compartment of her heart, but she wouldn’t allow his rejection to scar her like that. Heck, she’d have appreciated his rejection eventually, recognizing in hindsight the really rash, potentially disastrous decision she’d made.
Speaking of contradicting actions and personalities—maybe Deverill was more of a gentleman six years ago, because the present Deverill would have never turned away from a naked, willing Kate. It’s almost like, at the beginning, Jordan had decent characters in mind. But when she needed to create tension and add stuffing to the story, she made them do stupid things, effectively changing them into other people.
I tried to hold out for the promise of adventure when they went in search of the shipwreck, but I just couldn’t. Not for those characters.
Oh, this could probably be read as a stand alone. I hadn’t read any of the other Legendary Lovers books and noticed minimal fan service in the first half. I could tell there were other stories, but I wasn’t beaten over the head with them.
