His Scandalous Kiss By Sophie Barnes

His Scandalous Kiss by Sophie Barnes⭐️⭐️
      Before I even start this review, I have a confession: I'm a quitter. I quit reading books I'm not enjoying because I have so many others to read. And I've also never been one of those readers that can force myself to read something I don't find interesting (lots of literature assignments were left unread in high school and college, let me tell you).  

      I previously read Lady Sarah's Sinful Desires and was rather underwhelmed. It wasn't necessarily bad, but the secret wasn't all the exciting and neither was the book. For that reason, I skipped The Earl's Complete Surrender altogether. Sophie Barnes is not a go to author for me by any means and I didn't feel any loss at not reading that second book. I don't feel like you have to read the first two books in the series to know what's going on in this one, which was nice. Sarah and Spencer (Lady Sarah's Sinful Desires) make appearances but all you really need to know (at least to the point I read to) is that they were in the first book.

     I expected this book to be more of a Beauty and the Beast trope than Phantom of the Opera. Once I realized that, I decided to give it a go anyway because I have no experience whatsoever with the latter. Frankly, Richard just wasn't grouchy enough for my tastes. And so we come to probably my biggest issue with this book; the main conflict was external, and not overly interesting. Richard and Mary come to like each other almost immediately and the only things really keeping them apart are problems from the outside world. I personally prefer for my hero and heroine to not like each other much until they just can't deny their attraction anymore. Without that internal conflict, there's just not much to keep me reading. I finally gave up on page 186.

-Reader