This book did the Star Slide...
I gave my first Kat Martin book 5 stars, so I was excited to read this one. After a few pages, it was clear that the writing is bad: sloppy, ungainly, never the mot juste, with frequent slips in consistency and logic (i.e., one time the hero walks into a room without stopping, and a few paragraphs later we discover that he closed and locked the door behind him). 4 stars. Then we have "Papa Reggie", who's supposedly the heroine's guardian, but who seems really creepy. (Coincidentally, the last book I read was a Victoria Holt in which the heroine, also named Jessica, has an older guardian who wants her to marry his biological son. But Holt can pull that sort of thing off.) 3 stars. The hero and heroine both hurt people who don't deserve it. 2 stars. THEN we get to the midpoint, at which the author needs to restructure her story and stakes for the second half. But NOTHING in the second half was set up in the first half of the book. The hero becomes controlling, suddenly decides he doesn't want her after all, we're reassured that nevertheless they continue to have a hot sex life, etc., etc. So at this point, the flimsy characterization, which has been upheld by my acceptance of tropes, completely disintegrates into both psychological and narrative implausibility. It's utter nonsense. I have stopped reading. 1 star.