To Trust a Rogue

Readers will be bored and then exasperated by the wishy-washy heroine of this awkward Regency romance. When impoverished single mother Eleanor Collins heads home to London to be a paid companion to her aging aunt, she has to come to terms with her painful past. Eight years before, after being raped, she fled her home and the only man she’d ever loved: Marcus Gray, Viscount Wessex. Now she returns with her daughter—the product of that horrible night. Marcus has never forgiven Eleanor for leaving him without a word. He still wants her, but he refuses to admit that their connection is emotional as well as physical, and thus he only offers her a place in his bed, not in his heart. When he learns of the terrible secret she’s been keeping, he vows to be there for her and her daughter, but first he has to get her to trust him and have faith in their future. Eleanor can’t decide whether she wants to be strong and determined or swoon into Marcus’s arms, and while some readers will sympathize with her assumption that he’d blame her for being assaulted, others may struggle to join him in forgiving her for running off without giving him a chance to help her. Eleanor’s Aunt Dorothea is lovable and adds some much-needed lift to the sensitive central topic of rape and its aftermath, but Caldwell (the Lords of Honor series) falls short on the plotting. The story is nothing but one big misunderstanding bogged down with excessive narrative detail that fails to move the story along at an acceptable pace. (BookLife)