The Proposal

I used to really love reading Regency romances.  Maybe I'm too old for them now, or maybe I used to like them because they only implied sex, and didn't spell it out for you as though you didn't have any imagination of your own.  That's undoubtedly why I didn't care much for Mary Balogh's latest, The Proposal (#211).

Lady Gwendoline Muir is just that; a lady.  When Lord Hugo Trentham rescues her from a rocky beach slope after she has severely sprained her ankle and carries her to the nearest residence where he is a house guest, she finds him large, intimidating, morose and scowling.  He is a middle class, mentally wounded war veteran of the Peninsular War who earned his title through singular valor.  Of course, his father was a highly successful businessman who left his fortune and his business interests to his only son, so Trentham is filthy rich.  He has decided to marry, since his father wanted him to pass the business empire along to his own son.  Besides, he has to find a suitable husband for his half sister and has no idea how to go about it.  He also wants sex on a regular basis. Gwen and Hugo come from totally different worlds, they don't appear to like each other very much, yet they have steamy sex on the beach two days after they meet (!).  You've known how this one was going to end from the first page...

Frankly, I think this book at over three hundred pages was way too long.  Even at two hundred, the story would still have been stretched so thin it would have been pushing it.  The dialogue between Gwen and Hugo was preposterous.  If you want to read something steamy, I would definitely want the pillow talk to be romantic and/or imaginative.  It falls flat here, and doesn't get any better.  Guess I won't be putting a Hold on any of Ms. Balogh's future offerings.