Taste of Temptation by Cheryl Holt

Formulaic and dull

2 stars

At 25 years old, Helen Hamilton is firmly on the shelf of spinsterhood. With the death of her notorious father, Helen is destitute and must care for her two sisters with little money and no prospects. When she tries for a position of a governess at Captain Tristan Odell’s home she is turned away.

Desperate, she ends up in a brothel selling herself as mistress to the highest bidder. It’s a shock to both when Tristan ends up taking her home. An illegitimate rake, Tristan is excited by the prospect of having Helen in his home. But will he offer her a position as governess or something more?

I am usually a fan of Cheryl Holt although I’ll admit that she does like to stick to her formula of rich, arrogant man and down-on-her-luck lady mixed with plenty of evil relatives thrown in to keep the couple apart. However, in this novel it seemed far too formulaic which resulted in a dull story that I struggled to get into.

I can’t really say much about Helen as a character that’s positive. She was supposed to be a strong survivor while she actually came across as weak and pathetic. Tristan was your usual arrogant hero but without much depth. His actions didn’t seem to match his words and he was too quick to jump from one extreme to the other with his emotions for them to be believable. I’d like to say the pair had chemistry but to be honest they had so little interaction in the book that you practically forgot they were even there.

The reason for the lack of interaction was the secondary characters who seemed to take up all the pages. There was the “romance” between the immature, randy earl who was hard to like and Jane, the teenager who clearly knew what she was doing in trying to trap herself an aristocrat. That we were supposed to root for these two was beyond me.

Overall, as I said, I realty struggled with this story. It’s the second in the Spinster’s Cure series (after Promise of Pleasureand before Dreams of Desire) and I’ll read the next book but really can’t recommend this one. 2 stars and even then I feel I’m being generous!