I absolutely loved Xanthia and Nash, both of them, and the little bits and pieces about shipping in London at the time. All good until we got to the whole plot with Nash being investigated, and the story of Nash's brother and sister-in-law. It just did not connect to the rest of the book and made the whole thing ramble. Also the side characters were all ridiculous. It is a bummer that such good lead characters, so well developed, landed in a story that was not worthy of them. ( )

I read this book two years ago and didn't like it that much. I ended up giving it a C-. However, when I read it this time, I liked it much better. The plot is good and the development of the relationship is believable - a B this time. ( )

Read at the same time as Candace Camp's "A Dangerous Man". I thought this book was much more grabbing despite the similarities of the main characters and the plots. ( )

Liz Carlyle is capable of so much, so I don't know what happened here. I guess that she decided to pick up a few of the successful elements from previous books - a practical, business-minded woman who can compete in a man's world, a dastardly rake, fierce sexuality, a hint of intrigue - and hoped that if she tossed them together any which way the results would be satisfactory. Well, she was wrong.

What bothered me here is that Xanthia and Nash's relationship is so exclusively sexual that although I totally believed that they were hot for one another, and would go out of their way to arrange trysts and such, I never saw any kind of loving or emotional attachment developing at the same time. The kiss, they grope in public, they meet in back alleys; ok, sure. All of the soulmate, yearning for one another, emotional trappings just seemed like the kind of self-deception so many people indulge in when they don't want to see how simple and base their own motives really are.

If Liz Carlyle were writing erotica, this might fly - but she's not, she's writing a romance where the love connection never happens. And the book suffers as a result. ( )

I usually love Liz Carlyle, but I just can't get into this book.