Marriage Deal with the Devilish Duke by Millie Adams

 

DNF @ 77%

This was a BR with my friend, Heather, one of my favorite people on BR. Millie Adams is one of my favorite Harlequin authors. She has an ability to instill a lot of characterization and backstory into her heroes and heroines in a very short amount of time, and I love that she isn't afraid to inject a little bit of kink into her romances. Sometimes she gets panned for it but I honestly love seeing anything that isn't just pure vanilla repped by Harlequin. It used to be quite bland.

There's some wonderful things about MARRIAGE DEAL WITH THE DEVILISH DUKE. I liked that the hero and his son were both neurodivergent (I think they're autistic). I liked that there is some D/s and S/M stuff. I liked that the heroine was utterly enthusiastic despite her inexperience. And in the beginning, I felt their backstories went a long way towards explaining why they were into what they were.

The problem with this book is that the bar of my expectations was ALLLLL the way up here and the author decided to lie on the ground. The S/M was mostly just biting and pinching and Briggs spent soooo much time mansplaining sex to Beatrice that I was getting flashbacks to FIFTY SHADES OF GREY and its pseudo-kinky ilk. Beatrice also was a little bit problematic in how she was willing to force men into marriage to escape her fate (and was never really called out for this by anyone but her brother, the quasi-villain of this book) and headbutted her way into being co-parent for an autistic child she really didn't know anything about. She's just like "Routines? Who dat?"

Millie Adams is still an auto-buy author for me and I love what she brings to the Harlequin collection as a whole, but this ended up being a miss for me. First book was okay and third book was AMAZING, but this one might have just gotten disinvited from my birthday party.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars