Overall: 3.5 rounded to ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Plot/Storyline: 📖📖📖
Feels: 🦋🦋🦋
Emotional Depth: 💔💔💔💔
Sexual Tension: ⚡⚡⚡
Romance: 💞💞💞
Sensuality: 💋💋💋
Sex Scene Length: 🍑🍑🍑🍑
Steam Scale (Number of Sex Scenes): 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Humor: A bit
Perspective: Third person from both hero and heroine

Should I read in order?
Ideally yes – there’s some page time with prior characters in the series and the series really is fabulous! But overall it’s okay on its own. There’s not a lot of page time for these characters in the prior books.

Basic plot:
After meeting Ollie years earlier, sick and recovering, Necessity is stunned at the chance to redo his ailing gardens and getting her hands on the plans of Capability Brown.

Give this a try if you want:
- late Regency time period (1828)
- mostly country estate setting
- soldier hero
- light touch of second chance – these two meet and have a light connection 3 years earlier
- hero is described as a ‘proper, regal grump’
- scarred hero – he was attacked outside a club in a prior novel in the series with a knife and sustained injury to his face
- hero has gray in his hair and is described as a ‘proper, regal grump’
- lightly experienced heroine – she had a previous relationship but didn’t get to explore everything she wanted to
- hero calls the heroine “sprite”
- work place romance – hero is an earl and the heroine is his hired gardener
- lessons – heroine wants to experience things she didn’t get to in her prior relationship – positions, locations….
- higher steam (4 full scenes within a shorter page count)

My thoughts:
Tracy Sumner has a such a fun series going with this one. It really has so many fun stories and personalities tied together. In this one, MacCauley wants his brother to find love like him, and sets up the gardener in his country manor to tempt him.

I struggled with this one a bit because it felt a bit like instalust? We get a short scene of them meeting years before, but it was nothing intense or engaging to me for the most part. So when they feel like they jump into this relationship so fast, I felt like I was missing something a bit. I felt like they didn’t know each other as well as I wanted them to know each other. And because of those things the tension was lighter for me in this one.

They have...not really an enemies to lovers relationship but it’s a touch volatile. It’s a bit bantery with lots of push and pull. I thought they were both a bit too stubborn in this book was a bit frustrated with their ending behavior.

Overall though, it was a scorching read and the characters were enjoyable, if not my favorite. Hope everyone enjoys if they give it a try!

Quotes/thoughts:

I love when the hero orders the heroine to come to him.

“Miss Byrne, come here.” He beckoned with two fingers. Now.
---
“Here you are, in tight trousers and a wicked smile, looking like something out of a fantasy I’ve contacted. Revealing your, let’s be honest and call them what they are, your fantasies. To me. The melancholy Earl of Stanford. I know you’ll want to punch me for saying this, but I think I owe my brother a considerable gift for sending you to me.”
---
“This job is designed for me, Sprite. I will be so agreeable. I’m happy to put through any course you want me to run to prove myself. Happy to take orders or give them if that’s what you find you like. I have a month to show you everything you missed the first time around. Isn’t that what you said you needed to get my grounds in order? Daylight reserved for the gardens, and the nights reserved for us.”

---
This is so funny

Although the Leighton Cluster – so called because of their friendship with the Duke of Leighton and the fact that they traveled in a pack
----
Also, he couldn’t tell a servant why the bed was half collapsed, either. Unlike most of the ton, and he was thankful for it, he was handy with a hammer.
---
“Miss me?” she whispered, her lips going inside his open collar to press a moist kiss to his collarbone. “I love when you don’t shave. Umm…” She snuggled his jaw, his neck. Taking small, sharp nips that were undermining his vow to return her straightaway to the main house. “Your stubble against my thighs feels so good. Have I told you that? I think I have. You look like a pirate, all swarthy. Set to pillage,” she giggled. “Pillage me.”
 

Content warnings:

- Abusive home life and father
- Heroine has memories of her mother selling her body and also had to leave her home after her parents died so she wouldn’t be sexually assaulted by her landlord (who liked young girls)
- Heroine lost her family to cholera and was orphaned at a young age (12)
- Addiction – hero struggled with opium addiction and avoids alcohol because of this
- Mention of the heroine suffering from starvation and hunger when she was younger

Locations of kisses/intimate scenes:

 
28% - kiss against a wall
48% - 🔥 kisses, fingering for her, hero comes in his pants (she’s on a work bench)
54% - 🔥 kisses, fingering/oral for her, missionary (in bed)
59% - brief mention of her on top
65% - mention of when they did it in the stables with her hands pinned over her head but no details (boooo)
70% - 🔥 him lifting her against a door sex
87% - 🔥 blow job (incomplete), sex against the wall