Katelin Ashford was a bit hotheaded, but hardly wicked enough to be exiled from her beloved London to the wilds of the Caribbean just to avoid a scandal! But her trip across the Atlantic turned out to be fraught with peril and passion when a storm buffeted her ship, and cast hre onto the deck and into the arms of an infamous privateer. Yet virile Garrick Steele was no stranger; he was the very man who'd ruined her reputation back home! Cast adrift on tempestuous seas with this black-hearted scoundrel, Katelin swore she'd have her revenge...only to be undone by the searing rapture she found in the embrace of a loving rogue beneath a glowing PIRATE MOON.
Some nasty stuff here (**shudder shudder**). This is the kind of book that should’ve have been discarded after the first few chapters because it was downhill pretty much right after.
Here you have this London society girl who’s forced to go to St Kitts to be with her father to avoid scandal for something she did on a whim. During her trip down she gets sloshed and sleeps with a pirate who has a “swollen love tool” (!) and all sorts of other “attributes”. I guess you could let that pass even though it happens around page 75. Once in St Kitts she finds out some things that have her suddenly running her dad’s plantation all by herself ---how this is possible for a young woman with no knowledge of anything apart from socializing to go from Society Miss to Plantation Overseer I didn’t quite get but I let it slide. Well that’s where the book went off the deep end because she has these frequent clandestine meetings in her bedroom with her pirate which again seemed unlikely now that she wasn’t drunk. I’m all for the h/h getting together early but make it believable and not so flowery that you just want to skim the steam scenes. There’s also an inane sub-story about a serial killer that is just soooo dumb you’ll be shaking your head saying “gawwwd” every time Mr Wack Job turns up.
The worst though was yet to come because our London Society Girl/Plantation Owner/Sex Goddess becomes an infamous pirate besting the best at sword play, steeling booty from men who’ve been doing this forever and commanding a ship all by her lonesome (!) Pure garbage and poorly written too. Every other sentence had an exclamation mark making everything seem so dramatic when it wasn’t (picture a movie where the heroine puts the back of her hand on her forehead like she’s about to swoon) and there was so much purple prose that it made you feel like gagging more than once. This is your stereotype of the stupid romance novel that non-romance readers poke fun at and think all other romance books are written in the same style and I can understand why.
The only reason I didn’t give it a one star rating is because you get a good feel of the Caribbean and the high seas —also it must take quite a bit of effort to write like that (!).
Skip this pirate drivel unless of course you want a prime example of how a romance novel shouldn’t be written and rarely is today --thank god 8-/