I’m really not sure how to review this book. Lisa Kleypas is an auto-buy for me (though I haven’t yet tried her contemporary stuff) and I normally enjoy her tortured, damaged, will-do-anything-to-have-heroine heroes, but there was something about this particular hero that made me go, “whoa, buddy, say what?” Immediately after finishing this book, my first reaction was that I liked it. Upon further contemplation, however, my opinion began to waver. This is the 3rd book in the Hathaway series (the first one is about the eldest sister marrying Cam Rohan from The Devil in Winter and the second one is about the 2nd sister getting together with another one of Lisa Kleypas’ signature heroes: barely civilized, big as an ox, a little nuts, and all the way nuts about the heroine) and I was really looking forward to reading about Poppy, who was socially inept, could talk the ear off of a deaf man, and adorably self-conscious about her awkwardness. Poppy is everything I like in a heroine: she doesn’t rush head-first stupidly into dangerous situations, speaks her mind but knows when it’s smarter to shut up, and intelligent without being precocious. Harry Rutledge, her romantic counterpart, was at first very yummy. When I read that he likes to tinker and make little mechanical things (and weapons!) and that his enormous hotel boasts a bunch of secret passages, I immediately thought, “Batman!” I was all set and ready to love this hero. He’s tortured, mysterious, reclusive, a genius… hey, he’s even starting to sound like a Jayne Ann Krentz hero, but then he had to go and get a little stalker on me. And while reading the book, I couldn’t shake this niggling feeling that poor, little Poppy was bamboozled and manipulated to marrying her stalker…

Spoilers and stuff below, btw.

The set-up: The London Season is winding down and Poppy Hathaway is in love with Michael Bayning, the handsome son of a viscount. Michael returns the sentiment and would love to marry her, but is a bit of a ponce and afraid his father wouldn’t accept Poppy who, while the sister of a viscount and whose family has plenty of money, just doesn’t fit the mold of a future viscountess, at least according to Michael’s father’s strict standards. Michael asks Poppy in a letter to wait patiently for him while he tries to convinces his father that Poppy would make a wonderful wife for him. Poppy agrees even though her family thinks Michael should be courting Poppy publicly and proclaiming to one and all that he is in love with her. Meanwhile, Poppy is doing her waiting game at the Rutledge Hotel, a swanky place where folks who don’t have a mansion in London stay and live during the Season. One day, while Poppy is chasing the family badger (yes, a badger. Yes, that is indeed a symptom that the Hathaways are a wacky, but loving family) who had somehow absconded with the love letter from Michael, she literally bumps into Jay Harry Rutledge, the mysterious hunk-a-hunk-a-weirdo who owns the hotel, and gets a Vulcan neck pinch along with her windpipe almost crushed for her trouble. Instead of shrieking and running far far away, Poppy’s curiosity gets the better of her and she stays to have tea with Rutledge even after the choke-hold incident. Really. She thinks he’s strange, but interesting. He takes one look at her and decides he wants to keep her in his breast pocket forever and occasionally feed her M&Ms. Or skin her alive and make himself a fancy new Poppy scarf.

Harry Rutledge grew up in a hotel in New York with a neglectful, sorry bastard of a father who locked him up in his room without food and forgot to let him out for days at a time. His bad, bad mommy deserted them and ran away when Harry was a little boy and since the sight of Harry reminded bad, bad daddy of bad, bad mommy, he did what every bad daddy in romance novels tend to do: taught Harry that love is a waste of time and energy. Why not instead build a super-intricate, super-convoluted defense mechanism that would take a psychotherapist years to unravel? Hooray. Harry’s emo party-line is this: he doesn’t need to be loved and no one’s ever loved him, so who cares. He has no friends, no family, and only a string of mistresses dumped over the years with a note and jewelry delivered by his valet. He has achieved everything he has ever wanted without ever needing anyone. He is ruthless, mercenary, and cold. And forgive the expression, but a little bug-fuck crazy.

What does he do in the book that offends me so greatly, you ask? In the beginning of the book, Poppy loses a love letter due to a badger that enjoys taking stuff and hiding it. It just so happens that Harry comes across the letter, which he soon discovers to be from a rival for Poppy’s affections. Bayning’s courtship of Poppy is a secret for a reason—he is afraid his father would disapprove of Poppy and cut him off. Harry figures he could break up Poppy and her boyfriend by giving the love letter to Bayning’s father. How cold is that?! When Poppy becomes distraught and heartbroken, Harry swoops in and deliberately gets caught making out with her so that she would have no choice but to marry him or face social ruin. What a guy, right? Just before the wedding ceremony, Bayning party-crashes and tells Poppy what Harry did and Harry just says, “Look, pal, if you want her, you’re going to have to pry her from my cold dead hands and I’d like to see you try. I just want her a little more than you do, punk.” Harry even tells Poppy she is welcome to run away with Bayning if she wishes, implying he would make their lives very, very miserable if she does, so that there is no logical recourse for Poppy but to marry him. Poppy, of course, goes along with it because she figures Bayning would eventually resent her if she ran away with him and his father ended up cutting him off, so she really has no choice but to marry Harry. I would almost say that the dude is about as cold as a Harlequin romance hero from the 80s—he gives her a couple of punishing kisses and when she makes the mistake of mentioning her ex-boyfriend on their wedding night, he resolves to give her super-intense oral sex just so there’s no doubt that she would be thinking of no one but Harry.

And that brings me to another aspect of the story that I didn’t quite enjoy: Poppy warms up to Harry a little too quickly for my taste. The guy deliberately tricks and manipulates her at every turn for the better half of the novel and she suddenly decides that he is just a misunderstood little boy who needs her love. Kleypas makes it a little too easy for her, of course. The hotel is staffed with people brimming with stories of what a good, fair boss Harry is and how he has never really known affection and care. The matchmaking staff even creates situations where Harry and Poppy are forced to spend time together and thus get to know each other. Poppy’s family, on the other hand, tell her that there really isn’t a clean, happy solution to her sham of a marriage, so there’s really nothing else for her to do but to grin and bear it. AND both of her older sisters are in sickeningly happy marriages, which makes matters worse because Poppy would probably feel like an utter failure of a woman if hers didn’t work out. So why wouldn’t Poppy stay with Harry? She may be book-smart and intelligent in her own way, but really she is just a naïve, country-bred girl separated from her family for the first time in her life. How could she possibly be a match for a cunning, manipulative man like Harry? Especially with everyone at the hotel telling her how awesome he TRULY is.

There is one scene in this book that I really enjoyed and it really saved the entire story for me. Poppy, upon noticing that Harry looks like he’s about to pass out from hunger and lack of sleep, sits him down and pushes him to eat. While he’s eating, Poppy picks up the book she has been reading and reads out loud for him until he falls asleep. I thought this was a clever scene because it shows that Poppy has her own ways of handling Harry, too. Once Harry begins to lower his guard and allow Poppy to get closer to him, the story really vastly improved for me. Harry, as a reformed rake and a besotted lover—and not so much a crazy stalker psycho—is really a joy to read about. It almost makes me want to believe that he was just a lonely, misunderstood man all along and all he really needed was a woman to love him and care for him no matter what. I said ALMOST! I’m sorry, but I can’t quite forgive him for the crap he pulls on Poppy through the first half of the book. THAT WAS SOME MESSED UP STUFF! Sure, the ex-boyfriend turned out to be a total tool and Poppy deserved way better, but still! He deliberately broke them up and that was cold! To Harry’s credit, he DID tell Poppy that he was the villain of the novel.

Anyway, Tempt Me at Twilight is still vintage Kleypas and thus compulsively readable and I still enjoyed it even though there were moments when I wished I could have reached into the pages and cheerfully strangled the hero. Oh, and before I forget, there was another thing that made me go Oh gimme a break! The blurb mentions an enemy popping up to threaten the fragile bond between Poppy and Harry, so throughout the book I have to admit that I was suspicious of everyone’s motives, wondering if it was some cuckolded husband who wants REVENGE or a long-lost brother who only wants what’s rightfully mine, goddamn it! But the actual villain doesn’t actually appear until, literally, the last few pages and when he did pop up, I actually had to go back to the beginning and re-read that bit so I could remember who he was.

There’s some effective sequel-baiting here and I really can’t wait to read about the developing romance between Poppy’s companion (who has a deep, dark secret of her own) and her gambling, wenching rake of a brother. God, I really hope that it’s Ms. Marks who ends up with Leo in the next book (because I was really praying Cam Rohan would end up with Daisy in his own book and Kleypas paired him up with someone else. Boo!) because the two of them have interesting chemistry and I have to admit that the two of them really stole each scene they were in together.

Tempt Me at Twilight has great pacing (it’s a very quick read!), witty dialogue, and sizzling sex scenes, but not a perfect book. Because of Harry’s shenanigans in the beginning of the story, my final verdict is: aiiiiight. If I had to FUCK, KILL, OR MARRY Harry, I would say… fuck. He’s got the whole mad-inventor, rich industrialist Batman/Bruce Wayne thing going on and I dig that, but I don’t know if I’d want to marry the guy. Oh, and after the sex, I’d probably have to change my phone number and move out of the country, too. ‘Cause he’s crazy. But then he’d probably find me pretty quickly. So I don’t know. Hmm. I’ll have to think about it some more.

(Oh, btw, I bought this book. With my own money. From Amazon)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: B, Romance: Historical, Verdict: Aiiiiight.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.