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Rogues and Ripped Bodices
Limited Edition Bargain Historical Romance Boxset
Sinful Confessions - A Novella
Seven brothers, seven sins. Being a sinner never looked so good.
Once Upon a Rake - Full Length Novel
Do rakes deserve happily ever afters too?
Christmas Seduction - A Christmas Novella
Sinful Confessions - A Novella
Seven brothers, seven sins. Being a sinner never looked so good.
Once Upon a Rake - Full Length Novel
Do rakes deserve happily ever afters too?
Christmas Seduction - A Christmas Novella
A time for family, forgiveness...and seduction?
392 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 30, 2015
28 people are currently reading
136 people want to read
About the author
Samantha Holt
325 books700 followersSamantha Holt resides in Warwickshire, England, with her twin girls, having followed her soldier husband around the UK for nearly 10 years. Growing up in Hampshire, she was inspired by the authors Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, both of whom lived and wrote only miles from her home town.
Samantha loves the romance genre and has been devouring romantic literature for as long as she can remember. History is another passion of hers and she loves to combine her love for history and romance into exciting and passionate tales.
Samantha loves the romance genre and has been devouring romantic literature for as long as she can remember. History is another passion of hers and she loves to combine her love for history and romance into exciting and passionate tales.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 5, 2017
Rogues And Ripped Bodices by Samantha Holt is a collection of 3 books.
Sinful Confessions by Samantha Holt is a fabulous read. This well-written book has wonderful characters, drama, humor and spice. This fun read is fairly short, perfect for those with limited reading time. Sinful Confessions is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.
Once Upon a Rake by Samantha Holt is a fantastic read. Ms Holt has delivered a well-written book. Eleanor and Lucian's story is a wonderful historical wounded warrior tale. The characters are fantastic, add in the drama, action, suspense and sizzle and it makes this book into a pleasure to read. This is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.
Christmas Seduction by Samantha Holt is an entertaining holiday read. Ms Holt has given us the gift of a well-written book. This is a fairly short read, perfect for those with limited time for reading. Alexander and Emma's story is loaded with drama, bits of humor and sizzle. Christmas Seduction is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.
I voluntarily read a free copy of this book that I received from Instafreebie.
Sinful Confessions by Samantha Holt is a fabulous read. This well-written book has wonderful characters, drama, humor and spice. This fun read is fairly short, perfect for those with limited reading time. Sinful Confessions is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.
Once Upon a Rake by Samantha Holt is a fantastic read. Ms Holt has delivered a well-written book. Eleanor and Lucian's story is a wonderful historical wounded warrior tale. The characters are fantastic, add in the drama, action, suspense and sizzle and it makes this book into a pleasure to read. This is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.
Christmas Seduction by Samantha Holt is an entertaining holiday read. Ms Holt has given us the gift of a well-written book. This is a fairly short read, perfect for those with limited time for reading. Alexander and Emma's story is loaded with drama, bits of humor and sizzle. Christmas Seduction is a complete book, not a cliff-hanger.
I voluntarily read a free copy of this book that I received from Instafreebie.
November 7, 2017
I received the first part of Rogues and Ripped Bodices (Sinful Confessions) after signing up to the mailing list following my enjoyment of "You're the Rogue That I Want".
This book I did not enjoy as much as The Rogue That I Want. The overall premise was good, the historical detail nicely drawn, the sensuous scenes beautifully handled. There's even library sex!
However there's little respect given to the hero's understandable fear of losing another wife (he's got three dead wives already). And no concern that his first, most loved, wife, died in childbirth. Fear not, new bride will give him tons of children in unnecessary epistolary baby epilogue. (The epistolary part would have worked better had it featured earlier in the novel too; they first began their romance by correspondence, but no letters, not even love poems, are exchanged in the rest of the book, just this last one)
Couple with the usual *needing* a family, with "family" meaning she doesn't consider siblings, parents, or the man she loves, family, only any biological children will count, and the epilogue, I'm knocking a star off.
This book I did not enjoy as much as The Rogue That I Want. The overall premise was good, the historical detail nicely drawn, the sensuous scenes beautifully handled. There's even library sex!
However there's little respect given to the hero's understandable fear of losing another wife (he's got three dead wives already). And no concern that his first, most loved, wife, died in childbirth. Fear not, new bride will give him tons of children in unnecessary epistolary baby epilogue. (The epistolary part would have worked better had it featured earlier in the novel too; they first began their romance by correspondence, but no letters, not even love poems, are exchanged in the rest of the book, just this last one)
Couple with the usual *needing* a family, with "family" meaning she doesn't consider siblings, parents, or the man she loves, family, only any biological children will count, and the epilogue, I'm knocking a star off.
June 11, 2017
Loved it! Box sets are the best.
January 16, 2024
Sinful Confessions
When America invades England..never underestimate an American woman, Viola. Julian writes letters better than he speaks and through a series of misunderstandings finds Viola at his doorstep ready to marry. I loved how the author showed each of the characters’s feelings changing. To see Julian try to deal with the losses he incurred was so sad and his defeated attitude was understandable . A wonderful ending and a cute epilogue !
Once Upon a Rake
When 17 year old Ellie chases a rake, Lucien, her life changes drastically. It was hard to like Lucien for the first part of the book, but to see him humbled by circumstance and mature is a beautiful thing. Watching Ellie try to recover from Lucien’s horribly nasty words, it is a sure thing to say that words do , indeed, inflict much pain and trauma. Watching them work together to find the villain, the author does a great job of hiding them until the very end. The climax is exciting and the epilogue adorable.
Christmas Seduction
Communication is key in every relationship as this story show. Emma, left alone in her husband’s castle in Scotland while Alexander climbed the Alps, she struggles to make ends meet. A secret and a misunderstanding keep them apart. It was funny how everything seemed to work against them, but the ending was so adorable! Loved this story and the whole book!
When America invades England..never underestimate an American woman, Viola. Julian writes letters better than he speaks and through a series of misunderstandings finds Viola at his doorstep ready to marry. I loved how the author showed each of the characters’s feelings changing. To see Julian try to deal with the losses he incurred was so sad and his defeated attitude was understandable . A wonderful ending and a cute epilogue !
Once Upon a Rake
When 17 year old Ellie chases a rake, Lucien, her life changes drastically. It was hard to like Lucien for the first part of the book, but to see him humbled by circumstance and mature is a beautiful thing. Watching Ellie try to recover from Lucien’s horribly nasty words, it is a sure thing to say that words do , indeed, inflict much pain and trauma. Watching them work together to find the villain, the author does a great job of hiding them until the very end. The climax is exciting and the epilogue adorable.
Christmas Seduction
Communication is key in every relationship as this story show. Emma, left alone in her husband’s castle in Scotland while Alexander climbed the Alps, she struggles to make ends meet. A secret and a misunderstanding keep them apart. It was funny how everything seemed to work against them, but the ending was so adorable! Loved this story and the whole book!
February 19, 2018
Read this in 2017 - not sure what happened to my entry of it. My Kindle e-book boxset.
October 22, 2016
I received a free copy of this book from the author and this is my honest and voluntary review.
This book is a collection of two Samantha Holt novellas and one longer story that I think would be considered a novel. The first story is “Sinful Confessions, A Cynfell Brothers Novella” which is the first book in the Cynfell Brother’s series, the second story is “Once Upon a Rake”, and the third is “Christmas Seduction”.
1) The first story, “Sinful Confessions”, is a delightful story about a Marquis, Julian Cynfell, who has had three wives that all died young. Julian as well as the people of the village think he is cursed and he has sworn to never marry again. Suddenly an American woman, Viola, shows up on his doorstep and he realizes it is the woman he has been corresponding with in America regarding doing business with her father’s shipping company. Viola has traveled alone from America because she thinks Julian proposed to her in one of their business letters due to the wording he used encouraging her to come visit England some day. She is a spinster who was ruined when she was only 17 so when she thought Julian was inviting her to England to get married she jumped at the chance.
So what is he to do with an unmarried woman with nowhere to go? He can’t throw her out and he really doesn’t want to since he enjoyed the letters they exchanged and he finds her attractive. So she ends up staying as a guest until she can make other arrangements. Of course they fall in love but since he refuses to marry ever again there are some problems on the horizon, especially when his mother arrives without warning. Fortunately for us there is a wonderfully touching HEA that is the best ending in a Regency romance novel I have ever read. I’m sure you will love it too.
2) “Once Upon a Rake” is about Lord Lucian Deverill, Viscount of Rushbourne, and Lady Eleanor Sedgewick, Countess of Hawthorne. They had been childhood friends but when Ellie was 17 and Lucien 22 there had been a problem at a ball they were attending. In an attempt to convince Ellie he wasn’t interested in her he decided to scare her away by showing her what could happen to unescorted ladies who go into dark gardens with rakes. He kissed her thinking she would be frightened and run away but instead got caught by her father. Her family tried to keep the incident quiet but they felt she was ruined and jumped at the chance to marry her to an elderly Earl when the kind old man offered for her.
Seven years later Ellie’s husband has died leaving her his fortune and she wants to know more about how it is being used in the investments he had made during his life. A good share of her money is tied up in a cotton mill owned by Lucien and his businesses have been plagued with accidents including a fire in which Lucien was badly burned. Can the love Ellie has buried bring healing to Lucien before he looses everything?
3) The last story is a must shorter one. “Christmas Seduction” is the story of Alexander, Duke of Wyndburne, and his wife, Emma. Alex left Emma shortly after their marriage to go mountain climbing in Europe. Emma thinks Alex left her because she had not been good enough in bed, but actually he saw her run into the arms of a man he did not know shortly after the wedding and decided she had a lover. He had run off in anger at the time and has come home a year later in order to produce heirs. He needs to seduce his wife to get her pregnant, and then he could leave again after she had provided the heir and a spare.
This was my least favorite of the three stories because it is all about sex from the beginning to end. I know lots of romance readers enjoy stories like that so others would probably not be bothered by it, but I don’t care for explicit sex scenes. Other than that it was a pretty good story but if you took out the sex it would be about as long as my paragraph above.
Over all, I enjoyed this book. I think most of Samantha Holt’s books are steamy and would be rated R if they were movies. I give it a 4 star rating due to the over abundance of explicit sex.
This Kindle copy of the book had a flaw in the Table of Contents—it only included the first story. The other two books were not mentioned in the title or the TOC so I had to search for the beginning and end of those books. Once I had them book marked it was no longer a problem.
This book is a collection of two Samantha Holt novellas and one longer story that I think would be considered a novel. The first story is “Sinful Confessions, A Cynfell Brothers Novella” which is the first book in the Cynfell Brother’s series, the second story is “Once Upon a Rake”, and the third is “Christmas Seduction”.
1) The first story, “Sinful Confessions”, is a delightful story about a Marquis, Julian Cynfell, who has had three wives that all died young. Julian as well as the people of the village think he is cursed and he has sworn to never marry again. Suddenly an American woman, Viola, shows up on his doorstep and he realizes it is the woman he has been corresponding with in America regarding doing business with her father’s shipping company. Viola has traveled alone from America because she thinks Julian proposed to her in one of their business letters due to the wording he used encouraging her to come visit England some day. She is a spinster who was ruined when she was only 17 so when she thought Julian was inviting her to England to get married she jumped at the chance.
So what is he to do with an unmarried woman with nowhere to go? He can’t throw her out and he really doesn’t want to since he enjoyed the letters they exchanged and he finds her attractive. So she ends up staying as a guest until she can make other arrangements. Of course they fall in love but since he refuses to marry ever again there are some problems on the horizon, especially when his mother arrives without warning. Fortunately for us there is a wonderfully touching HEA that is the best ending in a Regency romance novel I have ever read. I’m sure you will love it too.
2) “Once Upon a Rake” is about Lord Lucian Deverill, Viscount of Rushbourne, and Lady Eleanor Sedgewick, Countess of Hawthorne. They had been childhood friends but when Ellie was 17 and Lucien 22 there had been a problem at a ball they were attending. In an attempt to convince Ellie he wasn’t interested in her he decided to scare her away by showing her what could happen to unescorted ladies who go into dark gardens with rakes. He kissed her thinking she would be frightened and run away but instead got caught by her father. Her family tried to keep the incident quiet but they felt she was ruined and jumped at the chance to marry her to an elderly Earl when the kind old man offered for her.
Seven years later Ellie’s husband has died leaving her his fortune and she wants to know more about how it is being used in the investments he had made during his life. A good share of her money is tied up in a cotton mill owned by Lucien and his businesses have been plagued with accidents including a fire in which Lucien was badly burned. Can the love Ellie has buried bring healing to Lucien before he looses everything?
3) The last story is a must shorter one. “Christmas Seduction” is the story of Alexander, Duke of Wyndburne, and his wife, Emma. Alex left Emma shortly after their marriage to go mountain climbing in Europe. Emma thinks Alex left her because she had not been good enough in bed, but actually he saw her run into the arms of a man he did not know shortly after the wedding and decided she had a lover. He had run off in anger at the time and has come home a year later in order to produce heirs. He needs to seduce his wife to get her pregnant, and then he could leave again after she had provided the heir and a spare.
This was my least favorite of the three stories because it is all about sex from the beginning to end. I know lots of romance readers enjoy stories like that so others would probably not be bothered by it, but I don’t care for explicit sex scenes. Other than that it was a pretty good story but if you took out the sex it would be about as long as my paragraph above.
Over all, I enjoyed this book. I think most of Samantha Holt’s books are steamy and would be rated R if they were movies. I give it a 4 star rating due to the over abundance of explicit sex.
This Kindle copy of the book had a flaw in the Table of Contents—it only included the first story. The other two books were not mentioned in the title or the TOC so I had to search for the beginning and end of those books. Once I had them book marked it was no longer a problem.
November 29, 2016
Good Lord, this writer needs an editor. Truly annoying level of language misuse, e.g. "lauding" over a domain (a multiple error). And spare me from heroines so "charmingly" klutzy they are incapable of even walking without tripping on a hem. The rating stars are dropping the more I read.
August 20, 2015
4.5 stars for the set
Sinful Confessions 4 stars; Once Upon a Rake 5 stars; Christmas Seduction 4 stars. (Read separately over the last few months)
Keep em coming Samantha !
Sinful Confessions 4 stars; Once Upon a Rake 5 stars; Christmas Seduction 4 stars. (Read separately over the last few months)
Keep em coming Samantha !
September 1, 2015
All very good
I enjoyed reading them all. The third one had me all ready for an ending that wasn't nothing like it ended. Almost disappointed but was still very good
I enjoyed reading them all. The third one had me all ready for an ending that wasn't nothing like it ended. Almost disappointed but was still very good
November 13, 2015
Good read
Interesting stories, the kind that keep you wanting more and more especially the least story. I wish I would have read it sooner
Interesting stories, the kind that keep you wanting more and more especially the least story. I wish I would have read it sooner
November 24, 2015
Great
I love historical romances. This time period fascinates me. Castles, dukes and royalty. Intrigue and magic make a great story.
I love historical romances. This time period fascinates me. Castles, dukes and royalty. Intrigue and magic make a great story.
March 9, 2016
Good
I enjoyed this set. It was a very good complete work of period setting. Would look out to read more from this author.
I enjoyed this set. It was a very good complete work of period setting. Would look out to read more from this author.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews