I am not sure why I decided I wanted Master Of Pleasure by Jessica Trapp. She is a new author I had never heard of and it had a cheesy cover complete with bad title.

I am thinking it was amazons lil blurb:

Book Description
A spicy historical set during the turbulent time of the War of the Roses.

WHAT? I am easy, we knew this. And the author is from houston, so hey gotta support the texans ;).

From the Inside Flap
A Bride’s Betrayal

By order of the king, Lady Meiriona is to be given to a bastard warlord in marriage. Rather than see his daughter and his lands in the hands of a Yorkist, Meiriona’s father ambushes Godric Montgomery when he comes to claim her but only after a kiss she’ll never forget…

A Bastard’s Revenge Sold into slavery in the East, Godric becomes the plaything of an Arab princess. And when she gives birth to his daughter, he is given the child and set free. Seven years of his life have been stolen and nothing will stop him from exacting his vengeance upon the woman who betrayed him…

A Slave to Desire Over the years, Meiriona’s dreams have been haunted by Godric’s passionate touch. On the day she becomes the wife of another man, he returns to ruthlessly take what is his. Though Meiriona vows to resist her captor, a traitorous hunger for him consumes her. The slightest surrender of her body inflames Godric’s soul, setting a battle-scarred warrior against a new foe his own heart…

If I had gone to the author’s site and read the first chapter I wouldn’t have bought the book. Really the whole book is campy and just not good. And I really wanted to like it!

RT’s review says something like it seems the author threw in everything she ever liked in a romance novel. And I agree with that statement. It is sad because it could have been a good book. It needed someone to hack the crap out of it, take out some elements and expand on others.

The book takes fucking forever to get to the point then wraps up in 10 pages. We start with a wedding farce, with the hero walking in unarmed into a church, alone to marry his 15 year old bride that the king is forcing her father to let wed a Yorkist bastard.

Yes lets think about that. War of the Roses is our time period – one I really need to read up on. But your king has just given you land and a young bride from a man who thinks you are the enemy – oh and you are a bastard to boot. When he contacts you to come now and marry. You go alone and leave your weapons at the door.

Then once you figure out you have walked into a trap, as you hold the young bride you have been promised in your arms, with a dagger to her back, you stand there and fucking kiss her instead of leaving with her as a hostage.

::blink::

Then after you spend five years as a Turkish slave (not even touching the stupid why or reason you are set free) you spend another 2 years getting wealthy to go claim your land and bride.

You wait until the day she is married – after she is married! And as you are in her room to kidnap her, you spend time to feel her up. Repeatedly. And after tying her up and climbing for hours down the castle, you take time again to feel her up and massage her poor legs that had fallen asleep.

And hey I give the hero points for not raping her but waiting for her to ‘want’ him was just plain stupid. You have her willing and able, you need her hymenless and knocked up. But gosh she doesn’t really want you, so you wait.

::blink::

We won’t even get in to the kid behaving unlike any 2 year old I have known of. To be fair maybe I got the time mixed up, my mind kept wandering, but she couldn’t have been more than 4.

le sigh, I really did want to like this but if I gave grades this would get an F. I would love to hear from someone who has read and liked this. The one review on amazon is from some woman out if houston… which, well, uh… anyway.

Amazon also had this quote:

Her debut novel MASTER OF PLEASURE (Zebra June 2005) finaled in more than 25 national fiction-writing contests.

And the contest are listed out on her site. I sooooo don’t get. But hey I will give her next book a try. I will just give it the 15 page reading test first.