Reckless Passion

by Jayne Ann Krentz

THE DEVIL WITHIN

With his carefully groomed Southern manners, Yale Ransom might have stepped out of Gone with the Wind . But stockbroker Dara Bancroft sensed a primal force beneath the glossy surface of her prospective client. Recklessly, she offered him an unspoken challenge, never expecting that their cocktail conversation would explode in a passionate encounter in a dingy transport cafe. She'd pushed him too far, tempted the devil within. Now she'd pay...straight from the heart!

Genres: Romance, Contemporary, Contemporary Romance, Category Romance, Harlequin

Paperback

First published December 1, 1982

About the author

The author of over 50 consecutive New York Times bestsellers, JAYNE ANN KRENTZ writes romantic-suspense in three different worlds: Contemporary (as Jayne Ann Krentz), historical (as Amanda Quick) and futuristic (as Jayne Castle). There are over 30 million copies of her books in print.

She earned a B.A. in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz and went on to obtain a Masters degree in Library Science from San Jose State University in California. Before she began writing full time she worked as a librarian in both academic and corporate libraries.

Reviews

[Azet · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Reckless Passion" tells us the story about the head-strong stockbroker Dara Bancroft, who will fight for the heart of the man whose character goes both ways: the composed accountant of a gentleman and the Southern Mountain hunter of a devil...but little did she know that she already have it.

Yale Ransom is one of the masterfully rough and obsessed heroes of Krentz, and he was a hero i strongly rooted for. Dara was a brave heroine who dared to blackmail him in the price of marriage-and this man took it without blinking. That proved something she didn`t see: that he already loves her. But Oh their powerful romance still fascinated me and with it Yale and Dara are both worthy MC:s that i followed through, and their journey of love is unforgettable one. How Yale in the disguise of the Devil in a jealous rage broke into her apartment through the window made me DAMN YEALP in fear,and it is a very special scene too and great written by the author. And the way he stalks her! Just made me laugh out LOUD AS HELL! But they had it so bad for each other, and i know instantly ´(like them) that they have an happy as in eternity happy marriage-life ahead of them.!

[*CJ* · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Reckless Passion" is the story of Dara and Yale.

A business merger between the stockbroker h and the tycoon H turns into so much more, when the h finds herself suddenly attracted to the Rhett Butler-esque masculine god. However, her cautious plans of courtship are thrown into the wind when the attraction is reciprocated, and the Rhett decides to tame his Scarlett. Thus ensues a battle of wills between two strong individuals with a scarred past, who try to subjugate each other. But who will succeed?

Another good read by SJ. I think the story has become predictable since I've been incessantly binging on them for the past few days, but they also prove to be great comfort reads. Passionate jealous heroes which are kinda chauvinistic- this is their genre.

Enjoyed it!

Safe
3/5

[reeder (reviews) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reckless Passion would be the usual JAK category romance featuring the seething passions of staid business people (see also: A Passionate Business, Dangerous Magic, Cautious Lover) if it weren't for the outlier element: the hero is a southerner. With a gold-capped tooth. (The hero in Wizard holds a professorship at Chapel Hill, but although he now lives in the south he clearly wasn't born and raised there.)

The accountant hero and stockbroker heroine meet at a party hosted by the heroine's boss, and she's immediately intrigued by the clues (see: gold-capped tooth) that his Southern gentleman veneer is a front for something rough and dangerous. He, in turn, would like to go to bed with her now, thank you. She distracts and provokes him with a visit to an Urban Cowboy-style honkytonk (in Eugene, OR?). He retaliates by taking her to a genuine roadhouse. When a brawl breaks out, they hitch a ride with a trucker they had befriended at the bar and get dropped off at a seedy motel a couple of hours outside Eugene, where of course they end up having sex, even though the heroine had insisted they would not. (This all happens the night they met. We move fast in the Silhouette Desire line.)

She wakes up the next morning basking in the glow of her instalove until the hero ruins the mood by telling her she's earned his (stock) account. She has a "we're never having sex again, this relationship is over" meltdown, then allows herself to be forced into going out on a date with him that night. When he puts the moves on her after dinner, she declares he can't afford her price. He challenges her to name it. 

"Marriage." 
"I accept the terms."

The next morning, the heroine is again swept up in her post-coital romantic haze and decides that she will release him from his promise because she's confident that he will insist upon marrying her anyway...because love. He doesn't. (I'm torn between exasperation at her naïveté and amusement at the predictable outcome.)

She repeats the "we're not sleeping together again" chorus, and he declares that if she doesn't want to get married, then they'll have an affair because there's no going back now. She insists that her failed marriage to a man who divorced her so he could return to his first love taught her that relationships needed to proceed slowly. He counters with his own failed marriage to his high school sweetheart as proof that knowing someone for your whole life wasn't a guarantee of happiness.

He pursues her with two different personalities: the urbane accountant, who takes her out to business lunches to discuss investment strategies, and the (former) moonshine runner who creepily stalks her while she shops for groceries and breaks into her bedroom uninvited in the middle of the night to play guitar. (*shudder*)

Meanwhile, the heroine -- who had been something of a professional dilettante until investing "clicked" for her -- taunts him with the idea that while she didn't experience that "click" with her first husband, she has experienced it with another man. Of course, the hero doesn't recognize that she's talking about him and becomes instantly jealous, demanding that she never see Mr Click again.

The final chapter wraps up with so much flip-flopping my head spins. The accountant invites her to his place for dinner. Afterwards, they start making out. She eventually says it's time for her to go home, at which point he reveals that she didn't have dinner with the southern gentleman but the moonshine runner and he's not letting her go. She protests. He seduces her until she's ready to give in and then he calls a halt, saying she has to leave because he can't go through the same dance they went through the previous weekend. She thinks he's talking about the "price" each of them put on their lovemaking, and assures him there's no cost tonight. He means he doesn't want to have sex then wake up to her trying to back out of the relationship (poor fella). They both confess they fell in love at first sight, and it's HEAs for everyone.

Not a recommended read. JAK's characterization of a "southern" hero is somewhere between Deliverance and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." Creepy and cringeworthy. The heroine leaps before she looks, repeats her mistakes, makes idle threats and insults, and plays jealousy games. She's an embarrassment to the professional, independent woman she's supposed to embody.

On the other hand, the contrasting lessons of the protagonists' failed marriages demonstrates JAK's strength in creating characters who are shaped by the experiences of their past but eventually discover that one negative incident doesn't need to define their futures. In JAK's vintage romances, people are made malleable by love in the most positive way.

JAK checklist
Pacific Northwest setting: Eugene, Oregon, with plenty of emphasis on Oregonians' conservationism.
Familiar professions: Soooo many JAK protagonists are in the financial professions, though the heroes tend to have more authoritative roles than "accountant." I'm sure this guy is an independent accountant and he's clearly well-off (fancy car, stock account), but he seems almost middle-class compared to JAK's usual entrepreneurs, financiers, and CEOs.
Marital status: Both are divorced. The heroine's ex-husband had married her on the rebound when his fiancée dumped him to marry another man. When his jilter had second thoughts, they both divorced their respective spouses. The hero's ex-wife married him to get out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then dumped him for someone with more money.
Age: She's 30; he's 37 or 38.
Heroine's eye exam: gray-green
Hero's eye exam: hazel
Hair color: Hers is "burnt russet"; his is "dark, amber honey."
Pets: None.
Vehicles spell success: He drives a gray Alfa Romeo.
Metaphors are for flogging: metaphors, no. Hillbilly stereotypes? Yes.
Hero threatens to spank heroine: "Just remember that back during the seventeen hundreds, during the so-called Age of Reason, it was still legal to beat one's wife! A very practical era."

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was pretty uninspiring. The whole premise seemed pointless and easily resolved if the two characters would have just talked to each other honestly for five minutes.


The story begins with Dara Bancroft and Yale Ransom (where does she get these names?) at a business party Dara's firm is hosting. She's a stock broker and they're trying to entice Yale to give them his account. It's unclear whether Dara was deliberately flirting with Yale in order to get the account or if she just found him interesting, but she's definitely being flirtatious. She's noticed that Yale isn't who he pretends to be on the surface. His carefully cultivated Southern Gentleman act doesn't jive with his work-roughened hands and the predatory look in his eyes. So Dara presses him for more details on who he really is.

They leave the party together to go to a night club and dance. Dara continues to ply Yale with questions that he could have easily deflected if he'd wanted to but instead he suddenly becomes angry that she keeps pushing him and vows to show her the "real" him that he's been trying to keep hidden. Then he drags her to a very sketchy trucker/cowboy bar where Dara's skimpy party dress and high heels make her the subject of much ogling. Yale, on the other hand, somehow manages to transform himself from a high-class gentleman into a redneck tough in 30 seconds flat just by removing his glasses and ruffling his hair a bit. They take a turn on the dance floor where he makes his sexual arousal plain and then go back to their table. They find a kindly and polite truck driver there and share the table with him. Then he asks Dara to dance and she agrees but this caps off a bar fight when a drunk cowboy tries to claim Dara for the next dance.

Dara, Yale and the truck driver make a run for it as they hear sirens closing in on them and for reasons that make no sense at all; they all pile into the trucker's 18-wheeler to make their getaway. Both Yale and the trucker insist that they most definitely don't want to be there when the cops arrive because they'll be arrested with everyone else. I doubt that's true but even if it was true, why wouldn't Yale and Dara just run for their car? The car was parked "a few blocks away" and the trucker swears that they'll "never make it" but that just doesn't make sense. As soon as they got off of the bar's property the cops would have no reason to grab them. Not to mention that an 18-wheeler isn't exactly a fast or inconspicuous vehicle. If the cops were soooooo close that they didn't have time to run to their car, then the cops were close enough to see the lumbering truck slowly exit the parking lot and head down the road.

But they all pile into the truck and again for reasons that don't make sense, drive for 2 hours before stopping. WHAT? Why would they do that? If all they were trying to do was get out of the immediate area, why not just drive 10 minutes down the road and pull over??? At the very least Dara and Yale could have been let out at the next gas station or, heck, dropped off at their car? It was completely ridiculous for them to let this trucker that they JUST MET drive them 2 hours away and ACROSS STATE LINES, before letting them off at a sleazy motel. And all to avoid MAYBE being arrested for being at a bar where a fight broke out?? That's insane!

Once at the sleazy motel, conveniently there is only one room available and of course it only has one bed so Yale and Dara have to share. Dara complains about their situation and Yale has the gall to say it's all her fault! That because she asked questions about who he really was it's her fault he took her to the sketchy bar and it's therefore her fault they HAD to spend 2 hours in the truck to end up at this motel. When she protests that Yale was the one who insisted on going to the sketchy bar, if they'd stayed at the night club she'd selected they would have been fine, he says that they'll just have to agree to disagree on that matter. It was just such a ridiculous conversation.

The minute they're in bed together Yale starts trying to have sex with her. He talks about how she'd been pursuing him all night and that this is what she asked for by pushing to know the real him. She protests that they barely know each other and it's too soon for sex but he ignores her. And in her inner monologue she thinks about how she's already in love with Yale (why exactly??) so that's making it that much harder for her to tell him no as his kisses and caresses set her body on fire. Yale has her half-undressed before he finally listens to her saying "NO" and stops.

But that resolve only lasts a few hours because Dara has a "dream" about making love to Yale and while she's asleep he's actually doing all the things she's dreaming about. She wakes up just before he takes the final step and says to wait, that she doesn't want this, but he tells her it's too late; she belongs to him and he's not stopping. They have sex and of course it's this transcendental experience. Like a teenage girl, Dara decides in her head that Yale must love her too because he couldn't make such passionate love to her if he didn't feel what she felt.

She's happy until the next morning when Yale says something completely callous and idiotic. He says that he's very happy with their "business deal" and that the "terms" they negotiated last night were sufficient to convince him to give Dara his account. Basically, he accuses her of prostituting herself to him. Dara is outraged and hurt that he thinks she slept with him to try to win his account, and just as outraged that he looked upon what she thought was a night of love, as nothing more than a business transaction. At this point, any sane man would have backed away, hands in the air and apologized for his thoughtless comment. Said that he'd only meant the statement as a joke or something. But, of course Yale doesn't do that because if he did there wouldn't be a rest of the book.

They hitch a ride back home with another truck driver, this one a friend of the first one, and he informs Yale that there might be a drug dealer hunting for Yale and Dara. That sounds like an exciting plot that might serve as the climax at the end where Yale and Dara face off against the evil drug dealer, but it's not. The guy is caught by the police the very next day without ever coming close to our happy couple so the whole thing was just a waste of time.

Back home at last, Yale insists on staying the night at Dara's house to "protect" her from this dastardly drug dealer, but it's all just an excuse so he can get back in her bed. She's still pissed at him for his comments that morning and tries to make him sleep on the couch but he basically just says that he's not going to do that. Desperate and irrational, Dara suddenly says that she's not going to "sell herself" as cheaply this time. That if the price for last night's encounter was his account, tonight she'll accept nothing less than marriage!

Yale agrees without much hesitation and they have sex again. Dara again falls asleep sure that Yale must love her because he wouldn't have agreed to marry her otherwise. She devises a plan to tell him the next morning that he's off the hook and doesn't have to marry her but fully expects him to say "but I really want to!" and then they'll live happily ever after. Instead his response is simply to say "okay" as if he could take or leave marriage and it's all the same to him. Dara is outraged again but instead of blowing up at Yale she tries a different tactic of pretending that she's totally cool with not marrying him and, in fact, is totally unaffected by their two nights together. She tells him that they're going to have to start over and build a relationship like normal people from here on out or she'll stop seeing him altogether.

From this point on Yale starts acting like he's literally two different people; one who is the Southern Gentleman and the other who, well, isn't. When he's the Southern Gentleman he's polite and attentive and Dara feels like she can control things. He still tries to get her into bed but when she says no, he leaves her alone....but THEN he goes home and changes into all-black clothes and becomes "the other guy" and breaks into her house while she's asleep. He comes extremely close to seducing her into having sex throughout the next week but doesn't quite go that far.

In the meantime, Dara is amusing herself by making Yale jealous. She talks about how she knows something is right when she feels the "click". Yale asks if she's ever felt the click with a man and Dara says yes. She's referring to Yale himself since she basically fell in love with him at first sight, but he mistakenly thinks she's referring to someone else and he's insanely jealous. Dara deliberately lets him carry on thinking this even though she claims to be a little afraid of Yale's violently possessive streak.

Finally they go on a picnic and Yale tries to get Dara to give him an estimate on how long they'll have to be doing this "dating" thing before she'll feel the click on their relationship. She hedges because she's obviously felt the click already and says vaguely that it could take weeks or even months. At the end of the picnic Yale invites her to dinner that night with the Southern Gentleman version of himself and she accepts. But when she gets there, he reveals he'd lied to her and it's actually the "other guy" who is waiting for her. He carries her off to the bedroom with the full intent of making love to her whether she wants it or not. It isn't rape, just like none of their previous encounters have been because the moment he touches her she's begging for him to take her. But at the last possible moment he tears himself away and says that he's not going to do it like this. That he'll wait however long she needs because he wants her so desperately that he's willing to do anything and he feels that if he forces her to take their relationship to the next level before she's really ready, it'll just poison her against him.

Dara finally confesses that she's in love with him and Yale's kind of like....then why have you been pushing me away and forcing us to go through this whole charade of starting over? She says it's because she knew he didn't love her back and he says that he's loved her from the first moment they met. They have a good chuckle about everything and that's the end of the story.

Literally all of their issues were caused by lack of communication and stubborn pride and as soon as they talked to each other, the problem disappeared. I didn't really like either one of the characters. Dara came across as schizophrenic and irrational with all her outbursts and demands that they not sleep together while she was literally panting after Yale. She also seemed like she was playing games with Yale for no reason. I.e trying to make him jealous of non-existent men.

Yale seemed kind of mentally unstable too the way he kept pretending like he was two different people and that made it okay for him to behave the way he did. And his arguments for blaming Dara for things he himself had done simply because she asked questions were ridiculous. He also seemed like a bit of a moron for not realizing that treating a woman like a prostitute the night after sex is NOT the best way to make her permanently yours. I also thought it was unnecessarily sleazy that he had a gold tooth. News flash JAK, that doesn't say Southern Gentleman, it says pimp.

[Debby · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars for the steamy scenes. They were good.

As for the story, it was silly. She meets her future business client (the H) and that same night she has sex with him.

She begs him: “Please, please, please, make love to me.” She isn’t a virgin by the way.

The next day she is angry at him and she accuses him that he has taken advantage of her and that she had no part in it. Wtf.

That same day they make love again. She tells him that her term is that he’ll marry her (while she only knows him for one day 🙄). He agrees to marry her so they can continue to have sex.

The next day she says that she has changed her mind and that he doesn’t have to marry her. He says okay and she gets angry again because he said okay.

That’s only the beginning of the book, but so it goes on and on and on.

She was always an Angry Bird. Always mad at him.

[Maria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 1982, this Jayne Ann Krentz early work lacks the dialogue and depth of character I have come to expect from her later work. The plot is different, however, so I continue to re-read it. The concept of having Yale court Dara as two different men is especially fun. I enjoyed the first part, felt it was a bit contrived in the middle to heighten the conflict between the characters, and then enjoyed the last part as Yale keeps Dara hopping, wondering who will show up next.

[Farah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The constant change of scenery was incredibly fun and I loved how Yale used his two different characters to court Dara .. it was amusing and entertaining. Dara was one stubborn woman but I actually loved that about her and Yale was very intriguing and unpredictable. Enjoyed this one a lot.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although not fond of aggressive, possessive men, this is Krentz writing (excellent). It is at the beginning of her writing and it only gets better.
Second reading. - this story gets a little slow at times, but I still do enjoy her writing. It's smooth and it flows easily. It is easy to follow and understand as well as enjoy.

[Mara · Rating 1 out of 5]

A stupid wishy-washy story. Yawn inducing too

[Sharon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Although I love this author (Jayne Ann Krentz), I'm starting to think I don't care for books written under her pseudonym, Stephanie James.

[Sherry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not one of Jayne Ann Krentz's better earlier works. The by-play between Yale Ransom and Dara Bancroft seemed stilted and out of synch. Although I did like how the plot featured around truckers and truckstops, very original!

[Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Her characters are always different than expected. I enjoyed all of her 80's books and took them for the era they were in and what was selling. I do wish they were all in Kindle Format!

[Beth G · Rating 1 out of 5]

Really terrible. Her early novels have been just awful. Read a few the library had and wished I hadn't. Waste of time and an upsetting read. Male was way too overbearing and domineering. I don't see the appeal. Woman was a doormat.

[Cem73 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Titre vf : Gentleman et démon

[Rexanna Ipock-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

You can tell this is some of Krentz's early works. It lacks many of the qualities I like in her later works. The male is too alpha and I miss her use of the paranormal.