tamabam

So this book started out quite well, but then the Hero went crazy and I wasn't buyin' what the author was sellin' after that point.

Let me explain. **Here there be spoilers for anyone who hasn't read the book**

The premise of the story is that the heroine was caught with a man who had his hand up her skirts. The friend who caught them challenged the man to a duel and was killed. There was a huge scandal, of course, and Alexandra was ruined. She meets the Hero, the dead man's brother, when he comes to her home to tell her that she was merely a pawn in the scandal; that she had been used to force a duel. As if that weren't enough, Collin Blackburn tells Alexandra that his brother had been in love with her and preparing to offer for her before the scandal.

So that's how they meet. Sparks fly, he tries to do the honourable thing, she figures if she's labelled a whore she might as well act like one, they get together and shortly after that the Hero goes bonkers. That's the only explanation I have for his behaviour.

Now, I love an alpha hero as much (if not more) than the next girl. Strict, rigid, possessive, stubborn, softening only when he is with me the heroine....yum. Those alphas you can work with. They are usually redeemed by the heroine, and can see their boorish behaviour for what it is (a plot device, mostly).

But a Hero who is irrationally jealous, accusing his wife of lifting her skirts for many before him (though she was a virgin when he took her), believing the worst of anything she says to any male in the vicinity and becoming violent with his best friend when he thinks (wrongly, of course) that his wife is in his bed? Those guys never change. His problem is his own, not hers, and she will never be able to fix it for him. It's those guys that we see on the news nowadays. Because they end up killing someone.

And that ain't romantic to me, folks.

Now, I would normally suspect that this is a knee-jerk reaction on my part to an overly jealous alpha, except that I've never read a book where it seemed to come right out of left field like it did for me with this one. Nothing Collin said or did in the first half of the book prepared me for how he was going to act in the second.

Anyhow, as a result, I didn't really believe the HEA. Ms. Dahl sets it up so that the Hero sees the error of his ways after a couple of lectures from the heroine and after she kills the bad guy to save him, but I just wasn't so sure.

So I'm on to the next in the series. I'm going to chalk this one up to the author hitting a button I didn't know I had about insecure, super jealous men.

3.5 stars.