Unfortunately this book just wasn't for me. Putney has several books that I regularly re-read because the characters are engaging and the plot is interesting. This book has neither engaging characters nor an interesting plot. Everything was rather staid and a little boring.

Laurel Herbert and James, Lord Kirkland, were married for a short time when she left him after witnessing him killing an assassin. They reconcile ten years later when he is attacked again and she nurses him. There's a problematic scene where they have sex, but he is basically unconscious. She gets pregnant, and so, they get back together.
I do like Ms. Putney's books and the Lost Lords series. We met James in the previous books and I was waiting for his story. This one, however, just seemed off. I never felt the romance between the two as there was so much distrust between them. ( )

It was okay. I didn't really like the heroine at all. The reason she left her husband was silly especially for that day and age. I'd like to think that if my husband killed an intruder in our house I would at least give him a hearing and stand by him since we have children to protect and there is no reason for a stranger to be in our house late at night if he didn't have evil intentions. She gave up on her for better or worse pretty quickly.

He was at fault too for not insisting she listen to his reasons.

So they decide to try again to have a marriage and she responds the exact same way when he kills a bad guy in front of her again. Even after spending years working with abused women she is upset when her husband kills the drunk abusive husband of a terrorized woman who has said that he will sell his child probably to a whore house.

And it was predictable. You would have had to be an idiot not to realize as soon as Violet shows up that Laurel, the heroine, was going to end up killing someone to save her.

I've read all the other books and wished I could have remembered everyone's stories when they all showed up at the end of the book. I did drop my jaw a bit when all the women started fessing up to killing people. Seemed too trust too soon.

I used to really love MJP but I think I'm just reading them now out of old loyalty and hope. ( )

2.5 stars rounded up. The whole premise of the story, and the main hurdle to their relationship, is the heroine being narrow minded and judgy about a particular incident she knows little about. And I found it hard to move past honestly. She sees her husband kill someone, which, sure enough, would be shocking and disturbing, but apparently it doesn't matter a whit to her that she knows he's a spy, or that the man he killed was an intruder coming after him with a weapon drawn... *facepalm* That single minute is enough to throw away their entire very happy marriage over. And she never revisits the issue with him, or re-examines her take on that event any time in the following 10 years of total estrangement... And plans to just stick with that indefinitely. Condemning them both to being heartbroken, lonely, and childless for the rest of their lives. Because there's a possibility he might have been able to just disarm the man or wound him or something rather than killing him. And because if you didn't already realize someone was capable of killing someone, like, did you really know them at all?! Ugh. The hero has the patience of a saint. Everytime there's a small step toward reconciliation she thinks 'well there was that one time a decade ago...' and then freezes him out again. I wanted to shake her until she got a grip. It's brought up just over and over. Not to even mention her own sketchy behavior when they're first reunited. having sex with someone delirious with fever when they're unable to give consent, and then hiding it from them and just sending them on their way when they become lucid. Super upstanding of her...

Trigger warnings violence and death on page, threat of rape, domestic abuse confrontation, abduction, and miscarriage. ( )

Boring, and the b-plot kidnapping felt tacked on. The characters were both too staid and virtuous to be interesting -- this practically felt like a Christian genre romance. (Although frankly the b-plot characters of the escaped slave & the valet were more interesting than the a-plot characters.) ( )