From Duke Till Dawn - Eva Leigh (London Underground #1)

I've hit a point where there aren't a lot of historical romances I'm looking forward to reading.  This sounds ridiculous; of course there are tons of historical romances out there.  Probably even a lot of good ones!  The problem is finding them, because a lot of them are awful.  So I carefully poked through the ebooks available from my local library and finally got out a few, From Duke Till Dawn being one of them.  A few other ones got returned within reading a few chapters, but I pushed through with this one.

Overall, it was a cute book.  The heroine, Cassandra, is a con artist, which is something I haven't encountered in a historical romance before.  Straight-up thieves, yes, but con women?  Not so much.  Two years before the start of the book, Cassandra conned Alex, the Duke of Greyland, out of five hundred pounds, and then slept with him in a mutual fit of passion.  But she disappeared before he woke up, and he's spent the past two years trying to get over her while simultaneously trying to woo a young woman who would be a suitable wife.  That arrangement has just gone down the drain when Alex finds Cassandra again--running a gaming hell.  And when he quickly finds out about the con, he wants revenge...but he still likes her, and also wants to help her when her partner skips town and leaves Cassandra with all of his debts.  #drama

The problem here is that the initial connection, the sizzle, happens entirely off the page, because it happened in that initial encounter two years before we actually get to the story.  For the entirety of the book, we're told how the two characters are experiencing all these feelings again, but because we never actually get to see that, there doesn't seem to be much of a blooming of romance here.

Without a lot of romance, what is a historical romance to rely on?!  Well, in this case, a few things.  This is not a sweet romance (there are sex scenes, and some of them are considerably raunchier than a lot of historical romance missionary sex--at a sex club, against a wall, from behind, etc.) but many parts have the feel of it.  This is because, while we don't see a lot of the chemistry part of the relationship, what we do see is the growing caring and trust between the two.  This is something that's underplayed in a lot of romances, which focus too much on the sizzle.  So, while this hasn't struck a balance, it was nice to see an emphasis on other parts of the relationship...while still allowing the characters to get down and dirty when the mood called for it.

That said, Alex is possibly an unrealistically awesome person.  I can't think of many, if any, instances in which a man who found out the woman he was in love with had conned him would dive head-first into helping her.  He's a duke; he doesn't need the five hundred pounds back, which is made glaring obvious again and again and again.  If he really wanted revenge, as he swears he does upon this revelation, he could have just left Cassandra to her debtors.  Of course, he's too honorable of a person to do that, but this whole situation--which, unfortunately, anchors the entire plot--just seems a little weak, to say the least.

The writing itself is decent.  The pacing is good--not great, but good.  There are, for instance, a few occasions when the characters went shopping or for desserts instead of actually trying to accomplish anything.  While I love these scenes in most books, with such pressing circumstances surrounding these two characters, these outings seemed a little out of place.

Still, I enjoyed this book, and while I'm not rushing to read everything Eva Leigh has ever written, I'm certainly open to reading her other works in the future.

3 stars out of 5.