Beverley Kendall's "A Taste of Desire"

Grade: B-

passion rating: Hot

"I had to wait a few hours after I finished this book to write this review — it’s hard to type when fanning oneself. This book is smoking hot — the sexual tension between the two leads crackles on the page and their love scenes are remarkably passionate. The hero, Lord Thomas Armstrong, is absurdly sure of himself, extraordinarily sexually talented, and gorgeous. The heroine, Lady Amelia Bertram, is sharp-tongued, headstrong, and, of course, beautiful. Their story, a loose retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, is both predictable and entertaining.

Amelia, at 19, has caused no end of problems for her widowed father. She has twice tried to run off with unsuitable suitors, is routinely shockingly rude, and refuses to marry any of the gentlemen who court her. Frankly, she’s often a brat. She is particularly discourteous to the handsome Viscount Armstrong, whom her father has mentored for several years — Thomas’s father died when he was just out of Eton. Amelia resents Thomas Armstrong’s closeness with her father, for she feels her father has woefully neglected her since her mother’s death when Amelia was thirteen. For his part, Thomas finds Amelia to be a “disrespectful termagant.” The first time they were introduced — a year prior to this novel — she insulted him at a ball by calling him “at best a rake about town, and, at worst a debaucher of women and maiden sensibilities.” If she’d been a man, he’d have thrashed her. Instead, he has since avoided her."