The Fake February Rake

Charlie Lane is working on breaking down my love of villainous heroes haha!

I shamelessly pilfered this from the Brazen Belles’ Facebook page.

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Charlie Lane – One of the few writers who can write cinnamon rolls that don’t roll over – that strong in character and naughty in their nature, 🥹🥹🥹 that threaten to make me toss my love for the overbearing alpha with questionable morals aside … (I’m not going to because I probably need intense therapy and love those anti-heroes.) But never have I been so tempted. 🥹❤️🥹 this author has outdone herself.

The Fake February Rake – Hades without the hellish has found his hellion of a sort, and I loved all of it.

I won’t rehash the story or the blurb here, but I will tell you what stood out to me the most –

The heroine was so incredibly good. I loved her strong convictions coupled with her ability to stay kind to those around her. I want to be her friend!

The hero was a stand-up guy. I found myself irritated at the gossip columnist for spreading rumors about him. 😂 Like – how dare she!

I loved all the banter between the H & h. It was so well done. 👏👏👏👏👏 I laughed out loud.

The ending was seriously the most precious ending of all endings. 🥹❤️😍🥹 The hero’s interaction with his sister, the way the problems were solved, and the lovely epilogue. It’s a lovely romantic story between really good people.

Well done!

The Sin Series By SJ Tilly

Why haven’t I read this before?!

The Sin series by SJ Tilly is three stand-alone books that are loosely connected and obviously set in the same universe. The heroes of each book are all introduced in the first book, “Mr. Sin”. This particular book was really great. I enjoyed the way the heroine would tease the hero by pretending to flirt with the receptionist and making eyes at the bodyguards. While some authors struggle to pull that off, Tilly does it well, and I found it all hilarious.

The second book, “Sin Too” was not quite as interesting to me as the first, but it still kept me pretty riveted. I liked Angelo, the hero, and enjoyed trying to imagine what this guy must have looked like. I thought about taking a page out of the heroine’s book and doing a Goodle search, but she went much further with her searches that I would have mine HAHA! I ultimately decided to leave things to my relatively piss-poor imagination. I thought the heroine’s ultimate conflict with the hero was asinine. I really just wanted to tell her to stop being an idiot about things.

The third book, Miss Sin, brought us back up to amazing. The hero is John, the brother of the heroine in the first book. He was absolutely magnificent! I liked everything about him. The heroine was one who was looking to be different than she was – a shy, weak woman. So she went and got her nipples pierced. It was great! Now, I have not had anything pierced except my ears, so I don’t know how accurate her subsequent experience was, but who cares! It was entertaining AF.

This series is available on KU 🙂

The Duke’s Wicked Widow by Caroline Lee

Caroline Lee has written us a book that starts with a bang and ends with a bang – literally, depending on how you define bang. 😉 This spicy story is the fifth in the Surprise Dukes series and, while it can be read as a stand alone, it would be more enjoyable if you start at the beginning and read the series. BUT!!!!! If you haven’t and you want to start with this one or you just need a refresher course on the series, the author has done us all a HUGE favor and has included a note at the beginning that sums up the parts of the series that you really need to know in order to understand the relevance of the characters and events in “The Duke’s Wicked Widow”. Everyone give three great big hip hip hoorays to the auther! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!

Fawkes, the hero, meets the heroine, Ellie, when she approaches him to ask if he would be so kind as to father her child. She is in a bad situation and is evidently prone to desperate decisions. She has care of and loves her dead husband’s natural daughter. The family wants to kick them both to the curb. So, she is on a mission to get pregnant and to pass the child off as her dead husband’s in order to secure herself and her child a home. Thus the banging begins.

Fawkes is a complicated and lovable (I loved him; Ellie loves him so that makes him lovable!) guy who is also in a bad situation where he did some bad things. Ellie is a wonderfully smart heroine who has the nerve and the will to do what she thinks needs to be done. The couple is well matched and their romance is both hot and sweet. I deeply appreciated the amount of forgiveness that happened in this book. Sometimes I just want the hero or heroine of the book I am reading to apologize and have that apology accepted. It was just a small thing anyway, right? (Heh.) It was rather relieving! This book is a wonderful addition to the series! It is found on KU with the rest of the series or you can always just buy it outright – click here to go to Amazon!

Pen Pal by J. T. Geissinger

If you read this, and you should, don’t hate me for recommending it!

I had never before read a book so intense that it required me to join the *already established* support group for readers when I finished. But then I read Pen Pal, and I joined the Pen Pal decompression group on Facebook because not doing so was not an option.

There is not a whole lot I can say about this book without spoiling it – and going into it blind or mostly blind is the best way to read it. I can say I thought about this book for weeks after reading it. I recommended it to my cousin, Eddie, who listened to it while in the car with his girlfriend. I did get some slightly judgy texts saying something about rabbits (kind of a pet name given to the heroine by hero during some smutty scenes) and the use of certain words used to describe female genitalia that were kind of weird (the texts not the words) since they came from Cousin Eddie. But I managed to override my own cringey discomfort because the book was so damn good I needed him to read it because I needed to talk about it.

I saw the book come across my Facebook feed as an ad a few times, but the vague blurb – while mildly interesting – didn’t strike me as a book I wanted to take up a valuable spot on my Kindle Unlimited selections. I don’t know what finally made me bite the bullet and read the book – probably just saw it on my feed enough times that I decided to see what the fuss was about – but man, I am so glad I did. I listened to the book while working and, when I finished, I immediately got my Kindle out and read it.

While I don’t think I will say it was the best book I have ever read (I did find the smutty scenes a little cringeworthy), it is definitely the most memorable.

Jilted In January by Cara Maxwell

The Rake Review series by The Brazen Belles has begun!

I have read several by her and I think this is my favorite – although I did really like the Hesitant Husbands series…

It is a second chance romance that has a hero who is half Chinese and a heroine who is a duke’s daughter. The hero’s ethnicity played a significant role, and I was glad to see the concerns and issues that a person of color may have dealt with during the time be an important part of the story.

I enjoyed the romance and the longing between the two main characters, even though there was a brief moment that I wanted the heroine to bop the hero over the head with whatever heavy object she could pick up. Anyhoo, I am still a bit miffed at the hero for his action. .

I am not generally a fan of intrigue and mysteries to solve in my romance novels. Too often I feel that kind of plot takes over and the romance is lost or is a secondary thought. Sometimes it also triggers my anxiety and that is certainly no fun. However! The mystery here was more a problem to solve. I enjoyed the way it was wrapped up. I loved that it didn’t takeover the story and was instead a way for the author to move the romance forward. I would 100% read another similar story by the author.

Bonus points! It was nice to see characters from former books make appearances!

Find the book on Kindle Unlimited or just buy it from Amazon! Click here for the link!