One Good Earl Deserves a Lover by Sarah MacLean
My rating: 5 of 5 flames
Spoiler Free
This book was wonderful. The beginning starts off with a bang! (and right where we left off in A Rogue by Any Other Name) and it only gains momentum, pulling you further and further in.
Lady Philippa Marbury is getting married in 2 weeks, and it’s to be the double wedding of the decade! She and her beautiful sister are making headlines left and right for their wedding. Yet, Pippa can’t quite come to terms with it. Oh she knows the wedding is inevitable, and her husband really is a nice guy. But Pippa is, well, odd. She knows it, everyone around her knows it. And her soon-to-be husband knows it. And he rather likes it. He likes Pippa, and for her, that’s enough.
Except, that it really isn’t.
She thinks she needs to understand the machinations of the consummation to get her jitters to go away. Being the scientist that she is, she propositions Cross, a well-known rake. She doesn’t want to be physically ruined, per se, but she wants to know what it is. What actually happens. Cross obviously turns her down. Yet, Pippa somehow ends up embroiled in his life without him even noticing. She is always there. And he can’t stop thinking about her.
Cross eventually realizes that Pippa will be in far more trouble if he doesn’t help her, than if he does. But he also tells her that knowing what’s to come isn’t really what she wants. She’s only using that as an excuse for her nerves.
Cross and Pippa have amazing chemistry, and it’s so brilliantly done. But Cross has problems of his own. He not only has a club to run, but he’s being blackmailed and it isn’t going well. There are at least 2 places where I teared up, and the most heartbreaking was where Pippa realized that Cross was trying to save her reputation, and she thought that maybe Cross needed someone to save him.
The ending also made me cry because I’m a big sucker for endings like this. I think that if you haven’t read a Sarah MacLean book by now, you need to.
***Thank You to Avon and Edelweiss for the ARC
