He was a rotten, lying, conniving bastard. The hero is a low-down, yellow dog cur and that’s a slur on yellow dog curs everywhere. To sum up: Do you really want to read a book in which the heroine calls her breasts bubbies? I'll take breasts, boobs, boobies, knockers, even mum mums (with great reluctance).a lot of things, but I draw the line at bubbies. Without it, the book would have gotten 1.

It was so refreshing to have a book give even a single moment to think of what life might have been like for that prostitute that I gave it a whole star for that scene. So often in romance novels, especially historicals, women like this are used and forgotten while the men who somehow think they're better than those women go on to find true love. I only have one nice thing to say about this book: There was one scene in which Luke goes to a prostitute, decides he doesn't want her after all, and spends a minute actually looking at her and realizing that she's a person too. She really really needed to be a nun like she wanted to be at first and he needed a woman with enough sense to understand him. Worse, they were just all wrong for each other. She worships him and easily tells him that she loves him. He explains it to her again, that she will be 'intimate' with him, so she plays a game to reveal personal information about herself. She has to perform 'Marital duties' with him. All right, I'll try to go with that.but he explains it to her. She doesn't understand what 'paid companion' means. Then he plays the benevolent protector, has Cassandra sign a contract binding her to him as his mistress for a year. So basically, Luke's rich, he wants Cassandra as his mistress, he gets whatever he wants to he tries to bribe her father, then when her father tells him to go to hell, he arranges to have her father set up for a crime. I tried, at first, to accept her naivety, choosing to be angry with her father for somehow sheltering her to the point that it ruined her, but you just can't walk around with your eyes open and believe some of the things she did.

There can be a fine line between stupid and naive, but Cassandra wasn't actually all that close to it. Luke was a ruthless jerk and Cassandra was just too stupid to breathe. I guess if you read enough of one author, you're bound to find a failure.

Simply Love by Catherine Anderson