This is the last book in a quartet, and it's been quite a while since I read book 3. I really liked the first three books, but what I saw in them of this book's hero, the Duke of Castleford, didn't make me want to read about him. In fact, I took against completely. I found him sleazy, and resented what I perceived to be an authorial intention that I was supposed to find his constant whoring manly and sexy and his constant drunkenness simply a symptom of having been hurt in some way.So yeah, I didn't start this book expecting the best from him. I don't hate-read; I picked it up because I was hoping Hunter would be able to turn this around and make me root for him (and several people had told me she did). She didn't, at least not in the first third, which was as far as I managed to drag myself. The basic setup is that Castleford inherits a group of properties from a distant relative, a moralistic bore of a man. In a private letter attached to the will, the relative asks him to discreetly ensure that the arrangement with the tenants continue. Smelling something fishy, Castleford decides to visit those properties, and as soon as he gets to the first one, he thinks he understands. The tenant is none other than Daphne Joyes, the beautiful woman his friends from the first three books have made sure he never met. She has turned the house's gardens into a successful flower business, and this has allowed her to offer refuge to women in all sorts of trouble (such as all three previous heroines). Castleford remembers Daphne was once a governess at his relative's household, so obviously, she must be the man's discarded mistress. And since she was clearly seduced once, he decides he's going to seduce her as well, whether she wants him to or not.So, as you might imagine, things didn't start well. Right from the start, Castleford behaves like a complete and utter arsehole, and with quite a bit of cruelty. He *knows* Daphne depends on her flower business for her living, and yet he threatens it and keeps her hanging about what he's going to do about it, even when she specifically begs him to just make a decision. And why? Oh, just because he wants to manoeuvre her into staying in London for a period, so he can seduce her. Total waste of space, he is.And stupid Daphne is one of those heroines who melts whenever the hero touches her, even when he's being completely inappropriate and scary and any sensible woman would feel sexually threatened. This just feels old-fashioned to me these days. I always hated it, and I wish it would go away. I read about a third of the book and decided I couldn't be bothered with these two. To be clear, it wasn't so much the kinds of characters these were, it was the execution. I can cope with all sorts of assholic behaviour, as long as there's an awareness in the narrative that the behaviour is assholic (I adore Gaffney's To Have And To Hold, for instance, and Castleford is a nice little boy compared to how Sebastian is at the beginning of his book). It was that awareness that was lacking here. There was this 'isn't he hawt!!!' tone underlying the descriptions of Castleford and his behaviour, and it made my brain keep screaming 'no, he definitely isn't'. Much too distracting.MY GRADE: A DNF. I actually suffered through book three because I wanted to get to this one, which had the character that I was truly interested in: Castleford. I love the concept of the reformed rake, especially one as far gone as him, but I'm afraid Hunter let me down. Passionate people are usually passionate in more than one thing, so you would think that a rake reformed would react to true love with much more...vigor? No. The ending was so sedate and unsatisfying. Some stories suggest sudden, grand epiphanies that then spur the hero into frenzied action, but in Hunter's case she prefers weeks to pass while the hero stews in his own mind and then somberly comes a conclusion? Boring. I was sooooo disappointed.
