I am sorry, but I have truly given up on Ms. Dain as an author. Nearly all of her supposed love scenes are nonconsensual. Please, can get get away from the bodice rippers of the 70s already. Intelligent modern readers want so much more. The deflowering of women is just not an entertaining topic, and especially not when done with such graphic and down right crass mishandling.
William finds out she is not a virgin and immediately blames her without ever once stoping to look around him at the ruined mansion he has got thanks to marrying a total stranger. she is just a possession to him like everything else. He just can't bear the thought of anyone sharing fun with her except him. He doesn't understand that every time he calls her CAt and falls upon her like a starving man on his dinner, that this is what her attacker used to do to her. He hardly even bothers to try to understand her point of view until it is forcibly shoved under his nose.
William is not quite as Neanderthal as her other heroes but he comes pretty close. Then we have her rapist Lambert going about scot free and trying to reclaim her. He tries to kill her, and at last she fights back for about a minute. Graphic violence ensues, and that includes William being stabbed in both sides with swords and still surviving to kill the villain. PUH-LEEESE.
We never see any commitment warmth or fondness in any of these books, just unremitting doom and gloom, and miserable lives for all her female characters. This is not quite as depressing as some of Ms. Dain's other books, but the characters are flat and insipid and not people I ever care about even though we are supposed to admire her as a victim. and him for 'forgivng' her.
I would rather admire my characters for being brave, noble, loving and committed to one another. As most intelligent readers of romance would. Let this one go for sure.

The Cynster series (very loosely linked!) has gone on for far too long, and the author is really repeating herself here. People in love with others, trying to escape an eforced marriage, the aunt becoming hte love interest instead of the sprightly young niece, and (...)[some] scenes crammed in to substitute for story, or even the characters having to speak to one another in meaningful way, it has all been done to death in Laurens' previous books. I want living breathing characters who care and are committed to each other, not just out to scratch an itch or serve their own selfish purposes by marrying because it is good for their career. The PW review hit the nail on the head-these people are so tightly controlled that we don't even care when they do the wild thing, and the wild thing scenes are completely tedious because so passionless. It reads like more of a Master and Johnson's manual at times. DULL!

This book easily has to be one of her worst. There is no spark in either of the two couples, and one good conversation between Aline and McKenna would have put an end to all the suffering and pain.
Also, there is no falling in love inthe novel except between the two lesser characters Livia and Gideon. Aline and McKenna are already in love and hot and heavy at the start of the book, then 12 years lapse. he wants revenge, doens't get it, and we get nothing but cookie-cutter love scene which vary only in terms of venue and position.
With Livia and Gideon they go to bed with each other too quickly. Having two couples in the book waters it down way too much for my liking. And I have to say Gideon was far more interesting than McKenna.
Can someone please tell these authors that a romance novel is two people falling in love?
One other small point-there were so many typos in this book, missing words, wrong words obviously inserted by a spellchecker, that it really got very irritating. The whole thing looked and read as completely slapdash.

This was totally turgid. Wading through crudity and uninteresting characters just because they are supposed to be the descendants of King Arthur is NOT entertaining.

The violence and rape is gratuitous and the 'deflowering' of each girl is formulaic and about as romantic as discussing the laundry. Which they do at length.

The introduction is a rehash of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone to become king. Then we get his decendants hundreds of years later? Who cares-there is nothing mythological or magical about any of them. The three novellas have as much depth to them or their characters as a puddle. Killing off the little sister Mary so the hero can be 'someone' in the first novella is absurd and crass and covered in about a paragraph. It all goes downhill from there. Give us romances where we see the couple really falling in love. You can possible cover a year of marriage in less than 80 pages and leave the reader satisfied on even the most basic level.

This book is really abysmal. We get no clear sense of either culture, Roman or Saxon. It is not Medieval, but the Dark ages, and very dark they are too in this book. The two of them snarl like a couple of wolves in heat. There is no sense of genuine commitment or love and the sex is pretty uninteresting. The book is littered with semi-colons I found myself counting them per page, 4 on average at the start of the book.
Her heroic struggle: to commit suicide by starving herself or working herself to death? She just ends up seeming like a selfish, short-sighted twit.
His heroic struggle? None so far as I can see. Abusing one Roman woman to get even for being made a galley slave is just too trite for words. Not to mention vindictive and foolish.

This author really needs to have her very bad habits squashed out of her. The worst offence being that she is still writing bodice ripper style books which could have been done in the 70s or 80s, certainly I can't think why they are getting published in the 2000s. There is little of interest here for the modern, clued-in sensual young woman reader. Non-consensual sex scenes offend me.

This book is the height of bad taste on a number of levels. The heroine is totally uninteresting, and the hero is a humorless prig of the first order. He sits around worrying about his lust all the time and fails to care about any other person but himself. When he finally decides he is going to consummate his marriage, with all of the enthusiasm of a man about to be executed, he really picks his moment. And has sex with her after she has just been nearly raped in a stinking dungeon and has just seen her assailant's head hacked off and rolling into the distance. That is truly just gross
Later, her stripping naked for bandages for one injured man is just silly-most normal women would just lift their skirts and cut off several yards of fabric, not strip naked in front of total strangers in the wilderness and then not even bother to put their dress back on
The story is way too short and 'one note'-his guilt over his supposed lust, and her love and then her anger
There is no real convincing falling in love with the story because she is already in love with him, has been since her childhood, and he is in lust with her.
Never once anywhere in the book do they say they love each other. Or even have a relatively normal conversation.
The sexual aspect of this novel is far too violent and her repetitiveness in the saying she will have to tolerate him for three years until she gets pregnant is just too silly for words. Her 'she loves him, she loves him not' attitude gets wearing after the first 50 pages.
The author also needs to be cured of her semi-colonitis. They are put all over the place and rarely used correctly and it only serves to distract from an already hard to follow and rather dull narrative.

The dialogue in this book easily has to be the worst I have ever read. It is the sort you hear on really bad sci fi programs like the old Star Trek, where everything is explained in a really long winded fashion to give you the background information on who these character are and what their situation, likes and dislikes. Endless comments about wine, his clothes, prime rib being Matt's favorite meal, and the hole in the big toe of his sneaker are just not romance worthy and bog down an already dull book.

His whole dumping her at the altar and second chance and engagement to Lily in the wilderness survival course, should have been shown, not told in a paragraph or two. Let alone dumping her at the altar again. Tedious.

This author breaks every rule of good story telling and is really starting to show her sell by date. I am heartily sick of pseudo paranormal stuff in supposedly mainstream contemporary fiction. Is this really the only way they can solve the messes they put their characters in?
And not especially interesting characters at that? Where is heat, sensuality?

I am also sick of books where the characters are rarely ever in the same room with each other, and only ever fighting most of the time even when they are.

Also, if they are already in love then where is the romance? This novel fails on every level a romance needs to function, and it is total fluff so can't be labelled women's fiction. I would give it minus stars if I could, it is so mediocre.

The start of the book gives a full bio of the heroine and rants on for two pages about how the Maericans can make coffee and not tea. She is also so down on men that she spends most of her time avoiding any amatory activity. The height of interest her her talking about it, getting a massage with some 'extras' which are plain vanilla, and walking in on her roommate, who is now 'in love' and pregnant. The other main heroine is a virgin, so nothing going on here except some pubescent fantasies and wondering, which she has to wait to find out about until the end of the book, when it is dealt with in one sentence!
The dominatrix with hideous old men, and the herone's mother getting more nooky than anyone else is just silly. All the guys are so unattractive in what they do or say that I can't believe they published this book. Black Lace is usually much more edgy and innovative than this tired middle class, middle of the road psuedo romance.
This reads likea really bad Harlequin romance with less sizzle if we are talking about the Blaze or Desire lines. I totally sympathise with the writer for the loss of her hubby, as she indicates in the dedication, but this is not even a romance, let alone erotica.

I object to any novel in which rape is seen as an acceptable way for a man to bring his wife into line. Ditto smashing her in the mouth, and sadomasochistic kinky sexual practices. there is way too much hot andheav stuff between Gavin the supposed hero and Alice, his mistress who has married another because she is ambitious. her husband is a savage who resorts to the abovementioned practices, and all the other women in the castle are like something from a Drcula film as they all satisfy their unnatural desires.
Judith is too good to be true in some cases and a total fishwife in others, and Gavin has got to be the dumbest man alive not to see through Alice. For 2 whole years, no less. The ending is melodrama at its worst, and the miscarriage Judith suffers because of her is just as glossed over as the appalling violence toward women in the rest of the book. Their constant jealousy and bickering makes the book a chore to read after the first 50 pages. I kept hoping it would get better but it didn't. And of course evil Alice is left alive for revenge at the end of the book. I wish she had sapred us a sequel but she didn't.

The book operates well on an adventure level when Bree tries to escape with her friend, and defies Mikkel.
Only when they are gone does he miss his bag of coins which he has stolen. There is a lot of conflict between he and his men, and he must learn who to trust to get his gold back and succeed in a man's world.
Oddly he comes to trust in Bree, and even in her God. Even Though she is eventually retaken and is a captive slave, she helps him. There are also the intriguing parts about life in Norway, and the fact that her older sister was stolen away years before, with the promise of them being reunited in the third book. Her clever disguise and resourcefulness, and Mikke's growing maturity make for a gripping read!!
On the Christian level it is sincere without being preachy.
On the historical level it is accurate and very interesting. The details of life in the Viking world are superb. A wonderful read for kids and adults alike.