This is a bit of a pivotal book, from a pivotal period in romance fiction. In this one you can see some of the older tropes rearing their ugly head; domineering male issuing commands that the woman follows without arguing enough; that sort of thing, the tropes that gave romance fiction a bad name for many years. But then Krentz pulls the rug out from under it in subtle ways, the woman has done an assertiveness training course and some self defence classes and she stands up to the male character, he dictates to her where they going to move but she keeps her business, in fact he has to deal with the fact that in some ways he's her dependent. Overall you can see the roots of later assertive female characters in romance fiction taking root and spreading their wings in this book.

This is not to say that there aren't flaws and there were times that I wanted her to tell him to "get lost" and call the cops on his ass several times and get a barring order organised, for being a controlling asshat like her family had been and I'm glad to see that in the end he let her be assertive and control her situation like she needed to. The wedding made me deeply angry tho, he basically told her they were getting married and while he acknowledged she was upset throughout the situation he didn't try to resolve it BEFORE getting married in Reno.

Still overall it wasn't bad, it got an extra half star for the ending. ( )

Fairly inoffensive (for the time), but not particularly memorable. As an aside, is it a requirement that all characters named Damon be moderately delusional and ineptly villainous? ( )