Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Readability: 📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔💔
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡⚡
Romance: 💞💞💞
Sensuality: 💋💋💋
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑🍑
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Humor: A touch
Perspective: Third person perspective from both the hero and heroine (and there’s some time from Harrison and Jane’s POV – they are the mains from book 2, and also Victoria and Lucien who are from book 1)
Cliffhanger: No
Format: borrowed audiobook on Hoopla

Should I read in order?
Yes, you’ll want to read this series in order, especially to get Colin’s full story which starts in book 1 (The Madness of Viscount Atherbourne)

Basic plot:
Sarah needs a fake betrothed for just long enough to get her by – and when she comes across wounded Colin, it’s the perfect opportunity.

Give this a try if you want:
- Regency (1817)
- countryside setting for a lot of the story
- brother of a duke/musician hero
- teacher heroine
- heroine nurses hero back to health
- fake relationship
- marriage of convenience
- escaping a villain
- medium to higher steam – 4 full scenes

My thoughts:
Overall, I didn’t love this one and it’s my least favorite of the series so far.

I knew Colin would be hard to redeem because each book we read in the series seems to bring him to new lows of humanity. You want to believe he really has learned from the past and is going to be a better man but this story just didn’t do his character redemption arc justice in my opinion. I wanted more from his story.

As this one opened, I was thinking it would really be my jam. It had some nursing back to health and proposed fake betrothal. But then it kind of went in a direction I wasn’t expecting and took me away from those themes I love. There was quite a bit of danger/intrigue in this one and I felt like I wanted their relationship to be more of the focus. I felt like we got more relationship focus in the prior ones and in this one I needed even more to get to know and forgive Colin.

I also really disliked that we got time in other character’s heads. I felt like if anyone needed all the page time for redemption, it’s Colin so I didn’t want to be taken from that. I never really understood after the separation why Colin ‘needed’ another fake betrothal from Sarah.


Content warnings:

- harassment/stalker behavior that the heroine suffers while a side character
- torture/violence
- almost carriage accident
- mention of sexual assault of a child (the heroine remembers one of her students being assaulted)
- attempted sexual assault on page

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes: (I might have missed some!)

Safe sex: 

No, but they are married and monogamous 

27% - kiss
67% - 🔥 kisses, fingering for her
82% - 🔥 kisses, fingering for her, missionary
85% - 🔥 pearl necklace play, missionary
98% - 🔥 missionary

Full break down on what my ratings above mean here: 

Overall: How I felt about it everything considered!
Readability: How ‘readable’ was the book? Did I fly through it? Did I have to tell myself to pick it back up repeatedly? Were any passages confusing?
Feels: Totally subjective to each person but did the book give me any tingles? Any butterflies? Did it rip my heart out (in a good way?)
Emotional depth: How well do I feel I know the characters at the end? How much did I feel their emotions throughout the story?
Sexual tension: Again, subjective, but how strong was the wanting and longing to me between the characters? A book might have strong sexual tension without a single touch.
Romance: Was there romance? Did romantic things happen? This can be actions/words/thoughts of the characters and again is subjective.
Sensuality: This is how the intimate scenes are written. Kisses and sexual scenes – how sensual were they? Were they on the mechanical side? Was there emotional pull tied in? Were the details explicit or flowery? These are subjective but generally (1) too short to get a good judgement (2) not all what I'm looking for - very vague or flowery prose (3) either not explicit enough or not enough emotional pull (too mechanical/physically descriptive without the emotions) (4) what I love in a scene (5) absolute perfection - perfect balance of emotional longing and explicit descriptions
Sex Scene Length: How long the bedroom scenes are (generally (1) is 1-3 sentences (2) is a few paragraphs to a page-ish (3) is about average, a few pages (4) more well developed scenes, quite a few pages with descriptions (4) the majority of the book takes place in the bedroom. This is always hard to tell for me on audio!
Steam Scale: Generally, each flame is a scene. If scenes are super close together I sometimes combine them. If a scene is super short or so vague I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t count it. There’s some levels of grey but generally the number of flames is how many sex scenes there are (I max out at 5 so I’ll put a + after if there’s more than that)