My rating:3.75/5 stars
First line: “When a girl trudged through the rain at midnight to knock at the Devil’s door, the Devil should at least have the depravity—if not the decency—to answer.”
Favourite quote: “This is important to you. Which means it’s everything to me”
Song of choice: Let her go by Passenger

I’m writing this review at nearly 3 a.m in the morning so I’m sure that what will follow is going to be a huge rambling but I hope someone will make sense of it. Truthfully, I didn’t even want to read this book. It was on my “maybe” shelf after I’ve read a review on bookbinge. Let me see what interested me: a bookish heroine, a scoundrel hero and lots of fun action. That’s what the book promises and it delivers.

Minerva Highwood hates Lord Payne aka the hero. She thinks he only brings destruction to those around him (which he does) and she wants to stop him from marrying her sister. Sweet darling Diana doesn’t deserve to be mistreated by such a villain, she thinks. So, late in the night, she goes to him and proposes a deal: they’ll run away together, she can go to the Royal Geological Society, win the prize, give him the money and all would be settled. His reaction? Laughter.

I liked Minerva, truth be told. She was funny, weird in a good way and she loved rocks. She wanted to leave her mark in the world and in that period, it took courage and a little bit of insanity. I admired her for that. Going in the middle of the night to a rake, propose a fake enlopment just to go to a symposium? Crazy.
Also, who doesn’t like the story about the bespeckled bookworm getting the hotshot rake? It’s Cinderella all the way. In her own words, she was: “Plain, bookish, distracted, awkward with gentlemen. In a word, hopeless.” Bookworms all around the world sympathize with Min, I have to say. Her thoughts regarding him were so hilarious, I was laughing in the first chapters.

“Her mother was right in this respect. Minerva considered herself a reasonably intelligent person, but good heavens . . . handsome men made her stupid. [...] Remarkable. The longer she stared at him now, the more she could actually feel her intelligence waning.”

One aspect I didn’t like about Min was the vulnerability she showed Payne. Even from their first encounter, she gives him a power over her. The power to hurt her. And he uses it, whether he intends to do it or he doesn’t. His words come out of his mouth and he says stupid things without thinking ahead. I would’ve liked if Minerva would’ve had more spine. Why didn’t she go to the symposium earlier? Why did it had to be Payne the one that pushed her limits? Why didn’t she stood up to her mother? Why did she let herself fade in the background? I am disappointed in her, considering all these things.

Colin Sandhurst, Lord Payne is a rake. A scoundrel. He uses women. To him, they are all faceless. He knows he’s the worst but what can he do about that? Until Minerva Highwood appears in the horizont. He doesn’t know what’s with this bookworm or the reason why he keeps teasing and needling her. He even wrote a list of M names so that he can keep annoying her: Miranda, Melissa, Marianna, Michaela, Melinda. The thing about Min is, she makes him want to be a better man. Along the journey he changes (although not his rakish ways), he’s actually the one that insists on a courtship. He wants to make things in order.

“This is ideal, you’ll see. We do everything backward. It’s just how we are. We began with an elopement. After that, we made love. Next, we’ll progress to courting. When we’re old and silver-haired, perhaps we’ll finally get around to flirtation. We’ll make fond eyes at each other over our mugs of gruel. We’ll be the envy of couples half our age.”

All things considered, I liked this book. And Ms.Dare’s writing style. It was not too light but it was funny. I think I’m going to check her other books as well.