At the tail end of 2015 I listened to my first Romance audio book. It was an interesting experience. Not my favorite, but also not bad. Since I started the Stud Club books that way, with Tessa Dare’s One Dance with a Duke I figured I would continue on that path for the series and picked up Twice Tempted by a Rogue.
Then I promptly forgot to read it as I worked through other books this year. When I finished We Should All Be Feminists and All the Single Ladies I needed a fluffy palate cleanser: audiobook romance to the rescue!
First, I liked this one quite a bit more than its predecessor. It wasn’t burdened with world building. This is relatively early Dare, and she gets better at pacing those things out, but for now she only had one new location to introduce and a relatively small cast of characters straight out of central casting to introduce so things went more smoothly. The title is ludicrous, which is a problem with the genre as a whole, but c’mon, nothing here is remotely accurate. He’s not a rogue, she’s doing the tempting, and the temptations are nonstop.
We follow Rhys St. Maur and Meredith Maddox as they square off and fall in love. Easy. He’s the very definition of a tortured soul and she’s a by the bootstraps survivor. They have a shared history, and it is both a boon and a problem for their furthering relationship. I’ll say no more here because this is a very straightforward love story and to recount the play by plays just doesn’t serve it.
The MURDER subplot is back, but it is contained to the second half of the novel and only completely dominates a couple scenes. We are also in the “someone else is off looking for clues” portion where we as the reader can sit back and let that disaster of a story line wait for the third book. The final quarter of the book is a bit cheesy and overly dramatic (Cave Ins! Runaway Carriages!), which was probably exacerbated by there not being as many story lines cluttering up the narrative as there was in One Dance with a Duke. Dare may have felt the need to ramp of the DRAMA, when really, this book had great small scale romance elements, a la Lisa Kleypas.
But I really enjoyed my time with these characters, and while its tough sometimes to listen to narrators have to be in the voice of the opposite sex, the narration here was good, even at 1.25 speed. I’m an outlier, this book is the lowest rated of the series over on Goodreads, but I liked it quite a bit – for exactly what it is.
I think this is the only Dare that I have DNF’d. If I remember it correctly it’s a “I don’t deserve her” storyline? But, I did still read the third and liked it the best of all in the series. I’m interested to see how you rank them.
It is a “I don’t deserve love because no one has ever loved me”/abused man hero story. Not for everyone, certainly. Rhys should have bothered me more, but he didn’t.
The first book was really uneven for me, I liked the pair, hated anything to do with the horses and the murder. I’m interested to see what the heck she does with Bellamy, since he I can’t stand through two books, but his lady love seems quite endearing.
As per being weirdo sisters this is also a DNF for me. I still haven’t read the third because I keep telling myself I should come back and finish this one first.