هل تخطئ الأنامل

by Violet Winspear

What, Merlin Lakeside wondered, could she do with the love building inside her? There seemed no way to release it except by just being here... hoping that Paul van Setan wouldn't realize she was the person he had cause to hate.

What would she do with the hate if she suddenly found herself at the mercy of it, deadly in Paul's blind eyes. Sang harimau, the natives called him -- king tiger.

She remembered his question: "Does the word vengeance really appall you, Miss Lakeside?"

Genres: Harlequin Presents, Harlequin, Romance

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 1977

About the author

Violet Winspear was a British author renowned for her prolific output of romance novels, publishing seventy titles with Mills & Boon between 1961 and 1987. In 1973, she became a launch author for the Mills & Boon-Harlequin Presents line, known for its more sexually explicit content, alongside Anne Mather and Anne Hampson, two of the most popular and prolific British romance writers of the time. Winspear began writing while working in a factory and became a full-time novelist in 1963, producing her works from her home in South East England, researching exotic settings at her local library. She famously described her heroes as lean, strong, and captivating, “in need of love but capable of breathtaking passion and potency,” a characterization that provoked controversy in 1970 when she stated that her male protagonists were “capable of rape,” leading to considerable public backlash. Her novels are celebrated for their vivid, globe-spanning settings and dramatic tension, often employing sexual antagonism to heighten conflict between the alpha male hero and the heroine, who is frequently portrayed as naïve or overwhelmed by his dominance. Winspear never married or had children, and she passed away in January 1989 after a long battle with cancer, leaving a lasting influence on the romance genre.

Reviews

[*CJ* · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Passionate Sinner" is the story of Merlin and Paul.

Our heroine is a plain Jane who has always loved the hero from afar. When she is shadowing him as a student nurse, an accident leads to his blindness-for which she is falsely blamed and shamed. She is NOT guilty, yet takes on all the torture and humiliation as she feels bad for what happened to the man she loved.
At present, hero resides on a remote island and heroine decides to take a job as his secretary. Pretending to be a much older spinster, she wants to take this opportunity to atone her "sins"- a chance she gets when the hero eventually discovers the truth. He then tortures her until things go wrong, then become right and it ends in a big forgiveness/ minimal grovel and a weird HEA.

It had angst, but very minimal. I didn't get why she was accepting the punishment LOL- It wasnt her fault. Pretty silly tbh- but if you like crazy/ smitten/ obsessive in love heroines who will sacrifice themselves for the hero- you will like the book.

Safe? SWE?
3/5

[Grrrrace · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites from Violet Winspear, so OTT and drama-doused in the way of the truly vintage Harleys (published 1978 but truly "out of time" in the way of so many of her books).

Months prior, world-class surgeon Paul van Setan (devilish by name and by nature) had been blinded when his post-surgery eyewash was switched by a nurse who harbored a grudge because he never took her up on her "trumpery" attractions. The plain-Jane, shy heroine, Merlin (“named for the falcon, not the seer”), was the student nurse who had handed him the cup, and was blamed at the inquiry and, distraught and tongue-tied, pretty much accepted the blame, losing her job. She had loved Paul from afar, more as a romantic idol than anything, and suffered terribly when he lost not only his sight but his ability to give his gift of healing to the world. She feels a great deal of guilt about her unwitting part in his tragedy.

After the accident Paul moved to a remote island in Indonesia, one of VW’s self-contained fiefdoms where improbable tigers still roam the interior and the hero is somehow the master of all he surveys. Embittered and obsessed by his blinding, Paul seeks distraction and some purpose to his interrupted life by writing a book on his surgical techniques, and he advertises for a secretary. Hearing about it, the guilt-ridden and infatuated heroine applies for the job, passing herself off as a middle-aged "spinster" (some of VW's musings about spinsters and their lack of attraction for men comes off a little bitter, perhaps autobiographical?).

On her arrival in Indonesia, the hero’s pilot/butler, Lon, gives her some background on her embittered employer and is puzzled that she is not the older lady he expected. He knows something is up and warns her about hurting Paul, whom the islanders respect and look out for. Lon believes her when she professes no such harmful intention, and cautions her that it's just a matter of time until the gossip that the hero is living with such a young woman reaches him. He tells her to keep her distance and not let the hero too close to her or the jig will be up.

Merlin meets Paul again and is overwhelmed by her feelings of hopeless love, guilt, and fear that he will find out her deception and know she is the girl who everyone thinks blinded him. She's frightened by his bitterness and his desire for vengeance, but he accepts her as the older woman she pretends to be, and they settle into a good working relationship. She is practical and sensitive, not making him feel like a burden or useless, and they have deep conversations in the way of VW heroes and heroines. The servants at the house are puzzled and amused by her pretense of being an older woman, but they like her and are happy the bitter and lonely hero has someone to make his hellish empty life a little less bleak, so they keep her secret.

But he is puzzled now and then by the contact they can't always avoid--her smooth hands and the sound of her in a silky kimono that suggest a younger, more sensuous woman. A typhoon comes, and he sends his house staff to the relative safety of the village, but she refuses to leave him and stays despite his anger. The storm hits, and it's bad, and they shelter in an inner alcove and for some reason he has to assume missionary position with her to shelter her. "The house rocked, and they were locked together in that rhythm, like lovers, she thought wildly."

She knows in the aftermath that he is aware of her deception and a reckoning is due but he holds off for a time, as they survey the damage. She serves him a meal and there's some geisha talk, but once the meal is through, he interrogates her, brails her face, and is angry that she tricked him, the blind man, and has some suspicions that she is the nurse who blinded him, but it's subtle threatening, not an outright accusation. She sticks by her story that she simply wanted the job and knew he wouldn't hire her if he knew how young she was (21 to his late 30s). He's angry that the villagers surely all think she is his mistress, and when she begs him not to send her away, tells her he has no intention of doing so but the charade is over and she is going to face the consequences of her deception. It's (melo)drama writ large:

"I want you!" Now he said it almost harshly. "I want you. I'm sick and tired of stumbling around alone, my days like nights and my nights as lonely as hell. I had you in my arms during the storm's rage, and I felt a sudden storm raging in me, sweeping away the arguments with myself that I could only be a burden on a woman, drowning out the restraints I've imposed on myself because I shrank from being a mere object of pity to anyone. Yes, I want your silky hair against my skin, your mouth on mine, blotting out the loneliness, your slim shape next to me, alive and young and warm, so I'll know I'm still alive and not buried in some black hole in the ground!"

He is intent on marrying her, and she's heartsick because he doesn't love her and just wants a sex toy to help keep the darkness at bay. But she couldn't deny him. She had too much warmth of heart, too much regret for her part in his tragedy, too much yearning to be part of him in whatever capacity he needed her. She agrees, and he is obviously smitten on at least a physical level, telling her she is "silk and a divine softness, the scent of her..."; he wants her until "the muscles cramp in my stomach," and the wedding will be soon. She hopes to herself that maybe he cares for her a little because he is willing to wait for sex until they’re married. He asks if she's the woman who harmed him, and while he plays it off as a joke, she is fearful that he is marrying her for vengeance as well as passion.

The day of the wedding, he receives a cable from his cousin, who runs the estate on the island but has been away, and the hero seems remote and disturbed. They marry, and his wedding gift to her is a belled bracelet that locks around her wrist, her "slave device," she protests. He mocks that, in the local lore, where there are bells, there are no demons, and she worries about what the cable from his cousin might have revealed. She begs him to take the bracelet off, and he refuses and tells her it will be comfort to him in the night, to hear it chime and know she is there for him, and she is remorseful and accepts her slave bracelet. VW loves her dommy heroes and submissive (but valiant!) heroines, for sure.

There is an island feast, and she is garbed traditionally and submits to a ceremony in which she is wrapped in silk and delivered to her husband's bed. They make love tenderly and passionately and it's everything she has hoped for. But the next morning, she is tormented by the thought that he might come to hate her and cries out that she didn't, she didn't (blind him), and he says she did, and reveals that he knows who she is, describing her as the other nurse who did actually blind him, and because she is a classic VW martyred heroine, she doesn't tell him differently. (It’s a little garbled, since Merlin was blamed for the accident but Paul seems to think it was the other girl’s fault, and there’s some lip service to why Merlin doesn’t say that’s not her (she thinks he wants that other girl and sees her face when he makes love to her, but it’s a little weak).) Their confrontation is classic VW drama, darkness and threat and high passion, and he thinks she is a cheat and a fraud and is out to punish but also is in thrall to her allure. He will use her until he is free of the passion and feelings he resents like hell and then throw her out of his life, he tells her. And she accepts that, unwilling to leave him to his lonely bitter darkness.

Her marriage is, in VW terms, a heaven and a hell. He never again makes love to her so tenderly, but she finds solace that she holds back the darkness for him for a time and makes him feel less desperate and alone. Love and sex give her a confidence and bloom, and the reactions of other people, including his slimy cousin when he returns, makes it clear that she is beautiful, emerging from her cocoon of modesty and self-effacement. The hero is unkind to her, alternating between passion and cruel words. "There were times when as of out of sheer devilment he was incredibly nice to her only to turn into a snarling enemy at some unexpected moment." He continues to make love to her, but it's never like their wedding night, with tenderness and a hope of love, and when he pushes her away afterward, she cries silently, afraid to wipe away her tears in case he hears the bells chiming and knows. Angst!

They have a honeymoon period, and weeks pass, and she accepts the bitter with the sweet. But he remains unforgiving. One night, they go for a “moontrail swim,” and he makes love to her on the tropical beach and he is tender and ardent, but because "every bite of the apple" must be paid for in VW's worlds, he is cruel to her afterward, telling her that for all her appeal and the delight he takes in her, she is treacherous and responsible for everything he has lost. He takes her roughly a second time, and she is distressed afterward, and strikes back at his bitter use of her by reminding him that he may hate her but she may have his baby, they have not been careful. And he so very cruelly tells her that he will take any child she bears from her and send it to his grandmother in Holland, and teach Merlin what it is like to have to live without part of herself, in darkness, as he has had to because (he thinks) of her.

She knows she is pregnant, and she quite understandably doesn’t tell him. But over the weeks that follow, it becomes clear that he knows, as her body changes, and while he doesn’t take back his harsh words, he is calmer and sweeter to her, almost loving sometimes. And the limbo continues, but VW has to wrap it up, so we get a series of highly dramatic if improbable events to bring it to a HEA:

After he acknowledges that he thinks of her as his wife, no longer just his “paramour,” he goes for a walk in the tiger-prowled woods. She follows, concerned about him. A crazed islander pops out of nowhere and attacks her with a machete. The blind hero intervenes just in time and takes a savage blow to the arm before the house staff can disarm the crazy machete wielder. They fly the hero to the mainland, and on the way there in the helicopter, she realizes that he can see her—his sight has returned! They can’t save the arm though, but the shock has caused his optic nerves to react again—in VW world, everything must be paid for one way or another, so the hero just can’t regain his sight, he has to lose something else. But in this case, he can at least continue to be useful to the world, as a researcher if not a surgeon, so one huge cause of bitterness is gone.

And when he sees her, looking just as he had pictured her in his head, so has another. The hero is able to confess his love and do a very small amount of groveling, and we’re off to a very romantic HEA, including a rare VW epilogue showing the happy couple a few months later cooing over their newborn daughter.

Among the many elements that make for a classic VW experience, we have high drama of epic, even operatic, proportions; lush descriptions of her secret kingdom; many anachronistic but passionate conversations between the characters about the primal drives and forces that compel men and women; betrayal; revenge; mistaken identity; secrets; bitterness; self-sacrifice; and, ultimately, the kind of OTT romantic love that you root for. Just the kind of story I’ve come to expect and enjoy from Ms. Winspear at her best, but to enjoy it, a reader has to be accepting of a certain old-fashioned and lyrical writing style; a very idealized British Colonial view of society; some stereotyping ethnic bias (the islanders are “earthy” and speak (quite eloquently) in pidgin English—but they are also given personalities and dialogue, as she often does with secondary characters). If you like dark and dominating alpha heroes and self-sacrificing heroines, with a heavy dose of whirlwind drama, this one's for you. All in all, a satisfying and highly dramatic read, as only Ms. Winspear can deliver.

[iamGamz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Location : Indonesian Island

The H was maliciously blinded by a nurse that he ignored, but the h, also working in the same operating room with them, was accused of being the one to blind him.

The h follows the H to an island in Indonesia, where she takes a job as the secretary to the H. She portrayed herself as a middle aged spinster to get hired.

The H eventually learns that she is not who she claims to be. That she is young and beautiful. He is an angry, lonely man, and they build a relationship as they worked together so he proposes marriage and she accepts.

Then he learns that she is accused of blinding him and he marries her anyway, but is exceedingly cruel to her. She blames herself in part for him being blind and accepts the punishment of his cruelty.

This was such a poignant story. It is a little over the top as most classic HP’s are, but it is so beautifully written that you can’t help but love every torturous moment of it.

I also loved the beautifully, descriptive way the author made the location such a huge part of the story. It wouldn’t have worked as well in any other location. The author made you feel like you were in Indonesia with the characters. I kept waiting for a snake to slither off the page. I am terrified of snakes.

I absolutely loved this book and am happy to recommend it.

[Aou · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read this as teenager(nearly 30 years ago). And I have never forgotten the bracelet with bells. Other than that, no need to remember.

[DamsonDreamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm thinking more 2.75. Man was this florid. I love VW but this was one you'd quote passages from to take merciless p*** of the genre. The premise was nuts. The nurse who was blamed for blinding top Dutch surgeon Paul comes to his tropical island retreat with a new identity to act as his secretary. Much is made of her pretending to be an ageing matron when in fact she is a lithe slip of a girl. It's long-winded, full of lush local colour and hero-ly cruelty. I mean, I finished it, but there was some heavy skimming in places.

[Wendy Darling · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars He’s truly awful to her and it’s so dated/problematic. But I love the Micronesian setting (I’ve always wanted to go to Palau!) and as usual, VS’ writing is so vivid and passionate, even if it’s a bit jumbled and melodramatic.

How many injuries can this guy get, though.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book started off at far-fetched and went on from there. The circumstances of the hero's blinding accident and the heroine's taking the fall for it were pretty out there. But the idea that she could manage to get herself hired as his secretary on a Pacific island by changing her name and pretending to be older than she is? That's really out there. It only got sillier from there (for instance, why did they need to assume the missionary position while sheltering from a typhoon in a windowless, interior room?) until reaching the peak of silliness with the stroke of a parang in the jungle. Along the way, though, as long as you didn't examine it too closely, it was an entertaining romance.

[Toni-Lea Chin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am a very happy man this day, mijn vrouw. I thank God for what I have."

Bravo... OMG. What more could I ask for in a happy ending.

This was definitely one of the best I've read so far from Violet Winspear. I absolutely loved the wronged/slightly cruel/brooding Hero and the endlessly devoting/martyred heroine. Both characters suffered pretty badly and in the end it was worth the read.

This book remind me of another one of my favorites Blind Obsession by Lee Wilkinson. A similar sort of plot but two completely different books.

[Aneca]

I can't resist the angst in these old romance novels

[Tia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel was way too dramatic, the heroine was so absorbed over the hero and her past. Not to mention the love she felt for him, that's she'd willingly die. It kind of made me sick to my stomach because no one should want to take their own life in loss of anothers pain or death. It was pretty pathetic.

[Barty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars. A promising, angsty setup with a gripping second half, but too much melodrama, repetition and a rushed ending to fully satisfy me.

I had high hopes for The Passionate Sinner because it has the kind of setup that should deliver a lot of angst. Merlin is twenty-one, which is a little younger than I prefer, and Paul is thirty-six, an eminent surgeon whose life has been destroyed after he was blinded during an operation. I don't mind an age gap, but I would have preferred the heroine to be older. I am also not enjoying naïve, virginal heroines as much these days, and Merlin is very much that type, although she does have enough likeable qualities to balance it out.

The backstory is that Merlin was a trainee nurse during one of Paul's surgeries. After a long operation, another nurse handed Merlin a cup of eye wash to pass to him. Paul routinely used eye wash when his eyes were dry, but this time the solution blinded him. The beautiful nurse who actually handed Merlin the wrong liquid cried, told a sob story, and all the men believed she was innocent. Merlin, being plainer and less able to defend herself, was blamed. Worse, she also partly blamed herself because the colour of the solution was different from the normal eye wash, and everyone said she should have noticed.

Merlin lost her nursing career and had to work as a poorly paid secretary. The cruellest part was that everyone believed she had done it deliberately because she had a crush on Paul and he had no interest in her. That was especially painful because it contained a grain of truth: she had hero-worshipped him and secretly dreamed of him noticing her. That made her humiliation and self-blame even worse.

I would have liked the book to open with more of Merlin's present-day poverty, disgrace and harsh new life, so we could really feel the injustice of what had happened to her. Instead, much of it comes through in flashback, which made the setup slightly less effective than it could have been.

Merlin then sees an advertisement for a secretary to help Paul write his book. He is now living on an island in Indonesia, having retreated there to live out the rest of his life as a blind man. Merlin desperately wants to do something to help him, so she applies for the job. Because this was written in the 1970s, a young woman going to live with an unmarried older man would create gossip, so Merlin deliberately makes herself sound older in her application. Paul expects a woman in her forties and hires her.

The book begins with Merlin arriving on the remote island. The pilot, a local who also works for Paul, is surprised she is young and warns her off. He says Paul has changed since his blindness, that he is embittered and dangerous, but also a good man loved by everyone on the island. He seems to sense there is something off about Merlin and warns that the islanders would turn on her if she harmed Paul.

This was one of the things that irritated me. Multiple characters seem to take one look at Merlin and suddenly become psychic. The pilot, a child and a priest all apparently sense that she knew Paul before and has some hidden, possibly nefarious connection to his past. It felt ridiculous. There was no real reason for these characters to suspect so much, especially not immediately on meeting her. It seemed like a lazy device to create extra drama and fear of exposure.

Another thing that irritated me hugely was the melodramatic, almost gothic writing style. Merlin is constantly reliving her guilt, dread and fear of vengeance, with lots of heightened inner torment about paying the price for what she supposedly did. The virginal innocence, danger, dread and punishment imagery became too much. I had to skim quite a lot, which I think may just be Violet Winspear's style. I remember having the same problem with another of her books, where too many passages felt overwrought, repetitive and skippable.

The repetition itself was exhausting. How many times do we need to be reminded that Merlin supposedly blinded Paul? It comes up over and over, sometimes several times within a few pages. Instead of deepening the angst, it became boring.

My other major issue was the cultural depiction. I know this is a product of its era, but the Indonesia setting felt completely fabricated and culturally insensitive. The author seems to invent her own idea of Indonesian people, repeatedly suggesting they are sexually free and promiscuous, which is not true of the conservative Indonesian family values, religion and political conservatism of that era. The local characters often felt like caricatures built to support the drama. It had that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom feeling of a writer inventing a strange, exoticised culture for melodramatic purposes, and I really disliked that.

Those are my major complaints, and they are the reason I can't rate this higher. But the book does have redeeming qualities, especially once the angst really starts.

For me, the story came alive when Paul realises Merlin has lied about her age. They are trapped together in a storm, holding on to each other, and he realises from her body that she is a young woman. He confronts her, and she admits she lied, though he still doesn't know she is supposedly the nurse who blinded him.

At that point, he gives in to the desire he has been feeling. Paul has been celibate since losing his sight. Although plenty of women on the island would supposedly be willing to become his mistress, he comes from a conservative religious background and doesn't believe in casual sex or promiscuity. He has physical needs, but he hasn't been able to overcome his principles. Since Merlin clearly desires him too, he decides they should marry.

I actually found that refreshing. I don't usually enjoy holier-than-thou, sexually judgmental heroes, but it worked for Paul because he felt like a man of integrity. When Merlin offers herself to him after they become engaged, he says he would rather wait until they are married. I don't mind rakish heroes if they love the heroine and redeem themselves, but here it was refreshing that Paul wasn't that type, especially in this setting. I would have hated it if he had taken a local woman as his mistress because of the power imbalance and the way the setting was already handled.

SPOILERS AHEAD

They marry, and their first night is tender and loving. Merlin falls even more deeply in love with him. But just before the wedding Paul receives a fax from his cousin and suddenly goes cold. Merlin suspects the cousin has discovered she was the nurse blamed for blinding him, and she spends the wedding and the aftermath dreading whether Paul now knows.

The next morning, it comes out that he does know. He only went through with the wedding because the priest had arrived and everything was ready, but also because he wants revenge. He has decided to make her pay as his wife.

However, he believes Merlin is the other nurse: the beautiful, flirtatious woman who actually handed over the wrong solution. He thought that woman deliberately blinded him because he rejected her, and he believes she had slept with various colleagues in the car park because those men boasted of it. He thinks Merlin is that woman.

Merlin realises the mistake but chooses not to correct him. She believes Paul desired her because he had this image in his mind of the beautiful nurse. If he knows she is actually plain Merlin, she fears he will feel nothing for her and reject her completely. She decides she would rather accept his hatred and punishment if it means he still desires her and wants her in his bed and arms. She loves him too much to be sent away.

I actually understood that rationale. It isn't just that she is a glutton for punishment. She believes the only part of Paul she can keep is his desire, and if she tells the truth, even that will disappear. Once she commits to that choice, she can't easily go back.

From then on, although their wedding night was tender, Paul punishes her emotionally. He lashes out with cruel words. Sometimes he lulls her into feeling safe by being kind, only to turn on her again. There is no more tenderness in bed. Merlin lives on tenterhooks, always waiting for his mood to change. He still desires her intensely, but tells her that once he has got her out of his system, he will get rid of her.

Because I enjoy angst, this was the section I liked best. The moody hero, the punishment marriage, the heroine's emotional torment and his hatred fighting with desire all made the book much more gripping for me, even though the melodramatic style remained.

The angst intensifies when Merlin realises she is pregnant. After their confrontation, Paul had cruelly said she would never be permitted to have his child. He didn't want a child with her, and he didn't want to raise a child in a world he couldn't see. When Merlin feels him out by mentioning a baby, he tells her there is no way he would let a woman like her raise his child. He says she is despicable and would be a terrible mother, and that if she ever had his child, he would send the baby to his grandmother in Holland so she would learn what it feels like to lose an essential part of herself.

That was deliciously angsty. Paul genuinely believes she is the woman who destroyed his life, his work and his rare talent for helping burn victims. He hates her, and he hates himself for desiring her. So while his cruelty is awful, it is psychologically understandable within what he believes.

For much of the book I thought Paul didn't really need a standard redemption arc because, at first, he was a good man who has been horribly wronged and deceived again. Merlin did lie to him, and she did marry him under false pretences. But once he continues to be cruel despite her continuous tenderness and love, once he says those terrible things about her potential child, the balance shifts. Merlin isn't actually the woman who blinded him. Everything she has done, however misguided, came from love and good intentions. She wanted to give him something to live for after he had written himself off from marriage, passion and ordinary life. By then, I did need him to acknowledge the anguish he had put her through.

When Paul realises she is probably pregnant, he stops being openly cruel. He becomes more tender, but emotionally remains withdrawn. His inner anguish comes out through his old dangerous habits, which had eased after marriage: swimming at night in shark-infested waters and walking through dangerous jungle paths where tigers might be. Merlin, terrified for him, follows him to the beach with a gun so she can fire at any shark and drive it away.

The climax comes when Paul walks into the jungle and Merlin follows because she is worried about his state of mind. A crazed local man is on the rampage with a machete and attacks her. Paul arrives in time to save her from having her skull crushed, but his arm is badly cut. Merlin rises to the crisis, binding his wound, finding opium when there is no morphine, and getting him onto a helicopter to the mainland hospital.

That scene had strong emotional potential. The villagers come together, and there is tenderness towards Merlin because they can see she is pregnant and deeply loves Paul.

The part I hated here was the cousin. Paul's lecherous cousin had earlier tried to force himself on Merlin, and Paul never learns about it. Now the cousin gets a tiny redemption by realising Merlin truly loves Paul and admitting he wronged her by helping Paul believe she was the promiscuous nurse. He was jealous that Paul had such a pretty wife. The book suggests Merlin has bloomed because of being passionately loved by her husband, gaining confidence in her body and how she dresses. And the restful cousin tried to corner her and used force when seductiin failed. But the cousin's behaviour is barely punished. He apologises for his lie (not the near rape) and laments that he will never have a woman as good as Merlin. That was not enough. The way sexual assault was minimised and shurgged off in that era is infuriating, so i can't blame the author for the realsitic way she wrote it. But someone should have chopped his balls off. 

The trauma aftermath scene was mostly satisfying but the final hospital scene was disappointing.

 The shock of the attack had restored Paul's sight. Yay. Apparently shock caused the original retinal damage, and I did look it up: shock can cause physical retinal damage through things like oxygen deprivation from low blood pressure. But the book's explanation about his retinas curling up and being reactivated by shock wasn't convincing, but I can let the basic idea slide.

Paul sees Merlin walk into his hospital room, and then the ending wraps up far too quickly. There is a breif mention about the fact that she is not the other nurse, but no proper conversation.  Or sufficient acknowledgement that he blamed her for another woman's crime, or that he punished her while misunderstanding who she was. He doesn't fully acknowledge what he did to her. He also doesn't properly call her out for letting him believe she was the other woman, which could have led to a meaningful conversation where she explained that she loved him, wanted to give him something to hold on to, and couldn't bear him going cold on her.

That could have been a beautiful healing scene. He could have admitted he was glad she stayed, even if it meant her lying, because he would have pushed her away otherwise and because he loves her. Instead, everything is tied up in a few neat paragraphs, with brief mentions of the truth, the baby and future happiness.

It needed more.

I was also peeved that he loses his arm. He says it is worth losing his arm to regain his sight because he can now work in research, but it still felt like too much. The author could easily have had his arm badly damaged but recoverable after surgery and therapy. Apparently Violet Winspear believes you can't gain something without losing something, but I didn't like that choice.

Overall, the angsty second half made up for the melodramatic, repetitive first half, but the ending was too brief to bring the book up to four stars. The setup had huge promise, the punishment-marriage section gave me the angst I wanted, and Paul was an interesting hero because he wasn't a careless rake but a damaged man with integrity who believed himself betrayed. Unfortunately, the melodrama, repetition, cultural caricatures, minimised sexual assault, unpunished villainess and rushed emotional resolution held it back.

I don't think I would read this again because it doesn't quite deliver the full emotional journey with the satisfying ending that I wanted. Three stars.

[RomLibrary · Rating 4 out of 5]

What, Merlin Lakeside wondered, could she do with the love building inside her? There seemed no way to release it except by just being here... hoping that Paul van Setan wouldn't realize she was the person he had cause to hate.

What would she do with the hate if she suddenly found herself at the mercy of it, deadly in Paul's blind eyes. Sang harimau, the natives called him -- king tiger.

She remembered his question: "Does the word vengeance really appall you, Miss Lakeside?"

[More Books Than Time · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hard to rate this. Do I rate the histrionic dialogue or the intense emotions? The vivid setting and her devotion and trust or his nasty threats? I enjoyed this for her deep feelings and willingness to sacrifice all for him. She was no doormat instead accepting his cruel comments by self-aware choice

[Bea Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book I've read by this author, and I loved every mad mad moment of it.

[Melody · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like stories where heroines disguise into another women. At first I was intrigued by the plot. Then i became confused. Lastly i sighed in disbelief about the hurried ending.