A Week to be Wicked by Tessa Dare

From Goodreads: When a devilish lord and a bluestocking set off on the road to ruin…Time is not on their side. Minerva Highwood, one of Spindle Cove’s confirmed spinsters, needs to be in Scotland.

Colin Sandhurst, Lord Payne, a rake of the first order, needs to be…anywhere but Spindle Cove.

These unlikely partners have one week
- to fake an elopement
- to convince family and friends they’re in “love”
- to outrun armed robbers
- to survive their worst nightmares
- to travel four hundred miles without killing each other

All while sharing a very small carriage by day and an even smaller bed by night.

What they don’t have time for is their growing attraction. Much less wild passion. And heaven forbid they spend precious hours baring their hearts and souls.

Suddenly one week seems like exactly enough time to find a world of trouble.

And maybe…just maybe…love
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Book 2 in the Spindle Cove series

I thought I'd focus on the feelings the book inspired in me rather than the actual plot, since y'all can easily find a ton of plot summaries anywhere, including the one above. I hope to do a quote-filled love-fest after the book releases and y'all have had a chance to read it.

This is a road romance, with a bluestocking heroine trying to get to an academic meeting to have her fossil discovery recognized, and a hero for whom everything always seems to go wrong who reluctantly agrees to accompany her. It is a huge winner for Tessa Dare. There was romance, there was tenderness, there was passion, there was humor - and how, always with Dare's sly subtlety that lets you know she admires her readers' intelligence and their ability to 'get it' without conking them over the head with it.

Dare infuses little bits of backstory and detail into the storyline that melt your heart for both Colin and Minerva. Sometimes if you blink you miss them, but they add such texture, such depth of character that you definitely want to slow down and savor every word.

As always, she is a genius with the written word. Her prose is gorgeous, always just right for the characters. She'll write these beautiful scenes, full of delight and wonder and emotion and follow it up with an exasperated "For the love of tits" from our hero. Pretty sure I personified a romance cliche when I "barked with laughter" at that one.

Dare's heroes have that ability to say the most romantic things. To convey with a single, simple, powerful sentence what others take pages to say. They are men you want to cuddle and hold tight, yet in addition to their vulnerability, they are manly and possessive. Colin is no exception.

Dare heroines are frequently super smart, daring, and bring the hero to his knees. Completely unintentionally, but they own him nonetheless. Minerva is just such a heroine.

Because I received this as an ARC from the author (thank you, by the way!), and my copy is already gone from my reader *sniffle - why do they do this?!*, I plan to have this delivered to my house on release day, which is 27 March. I will want to read it again to savor all those yummy little details. It just made me feel good not only after I closed the book, but while I was reading it. You always want the opportunity to reread a book that makes you feel that way.

Somehow I missed the first book in this series, but I picked it up at Passion and Prose. So more happy reading for me.