An utterly ridiculous cover for a book that’s more about probability than rippling abs

I really like the cut of Cecilia Grant’s jib. Her romances read as refreshingly simple, high on practicality and low on histrionics. The leads each have set out to accomplish something, and they find that the other has complementary skills and therefore can help each other achieve their goals. Along the way, their respect for each others’ talents becomes admiration and love.

It’s not romantic, in the traditional sense of the genre, with wind-swept hair and rain-soaked gowns and proclamations of love on cliff-tops. But it is genuine. For all of the modern-day wedding vows about marrying one’s best friend, partner, confidante, etc, you believe it of Cecilia Grant’s characters, because what they lack in grand gestures, they make up for in continued small demonstrations that the other person is correct and justified in trusting them and putting them first. In matters of the heart AND of the mind, they are each others’ #1.

Lydia Slaughter is mistress to a gentleman who likes to get drunk and publicly boast of her prowess in bed. She puts up with it because, quite frankly, she enjoys bedding him, and because she hopes to eventually save enough of her allowance to buy her independence. Will Blackshear first sights her at a low-mid tier gaming club and is promptly put off by her benefactor’s lack of chivalry. His gentle reproach of the man does not impress Lydia, though, and she fleeces Will at the card table to encourage him to back off. Rather than doing so, he corners her at the next gathering to demand his money back, as he knew she was obviously cheating. Turns out, Lydia is something of a savant when it comes to gaming skills. She has a photographic memory and can calculate difficult odds in her head easily. As such, counting cards at a small table is cake for her, and after her man nods off from drink, she assumes his place and collects money toward her Free Lydia fund. It’s quite the scheme.

Lydia warms to Will when, after she reveals her talent, he is not angry but impressed and curious to learn more about it. Relishing in the role of teacher, and feeling flattered by genuine appreciation of her talent and not just what she might offer in the bedroom, Lydia concocts a plan for the two of them to hit up larger scale gaming hells so that they might both get they money they need for their purposes more quickly on higher stakes tables. The problem is, they must do this — involving a complicated system of head-math and attention to subtle signals — while filing away their physical attraction to each other, which can tend to cloud formerly sharp minds.

If there was anything I didn’t like about A Gentleman Undone, it was that the characters made their first few physical encounters complicated for reasons that I understood, but were still frustrating. Will wants Lydia to see him as the man who loves her mind, so he is concerned that giving into his lust is a betrayal of that promise, while Lydia tends to go into “mistress mode” and closes off herself from Will emotionally. It’s in character for both of them to behave this way, but these encounters read very uncomfortably. Will’s entire internal monologue is that he is trying to stop himself but he can’t because she’s too tempting, but he can tell she’s not “present” so he doesn’t really want to with this version of her after all. It’s not non-consensual, but it’s very emotionally confused. I rarely find myself saying this, but as a reader, I might have actually preferred one or two fewer sex scenes in favor of waiting for the characters to become truly emotionally secure enough with each other.

And yet, that wish of mine asks for an inherently “tidier” book, and Cecilia Grant has a way of exposing the messy in a candid, non-sensational way. Her female heroines declare, “Love me as I am,” and the male heroes respond, “If you’ll have me as I am as well.”