Daring and the Duke by Sarah MacLean
Series : The Bareknuckle Bastards #3
Grace Condry has spent a lifetime running from her past. Betrayed as a child by her only love and raised on the streets, she now hides in plain sight as queen of London’s darkest corners. Grace has a sharp mind and a powerful right hook and has never met an enemy she could not best, until the man she once loved returns.
Single-minded and ruthless, Ewan, Duke of Marwick, has spent a decade searching for the woman he never stopped loving. A long-ago gamble may have lost her forever, but Ewan will go to any lengths to win Grace back… and make her his duchess.
Reconciliation is the last thing Grace wants. Unable to forgive the past, she vows to take her revenge. But revenge requires keeping Ewan close, and soon her enemy seems to be something else altogether―something she can’t resist, even as he threatens the world she's built, the life she's claimed… and the heart she swore he'd never steal again.
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The last time I felt this pumped while reading a Sarah MacLean book was during Never Judge A Lady by her Cover!
I was a little late reading The Bareknuckle Bastards series and I wasn't fond of book one! I took a chance on book two and it was cute but nothing special except for the writing! But I was still drawn in by the promise of a second chance romance that meets revenge, so I was curious about Grace and Ewan's story!
Maybe I had too many expectations, but Daring and the Duke fell a little short of them.
After the events of the previous two books, Ewan had a lot to make up for! Daring and the Duke starts off well and we get to see the change in Ewan now that he knows that Grace is alive. He had literally gone off the rails when he'd believed that she was dead, so it was quite nice to see him try to make up for the things he did. 'Try' being the operative word. Because he didn't do much except for that. I wanted more groveling and Grace to hold strong despite her feelings, but I felt as if she knew she was going to give in from the very beginning itself and so she didn't make much effort.
The reason for Ewan's betrayal was quite obvious but I guess if it had been addressed right at the beginning there wouldn't have been much conflict, so we've just got the characters going back and forth between attraction and anger due to the past.
I loved seeing Grace as Dahlia, the queen of Covent Garden! It was pretty nice to finally see her in her element and get a look at her club that mainly serves women! Additional points for having a non-virgin heroine! Except for these elements and a few other scenes, there was nothing much to keep me hooked. It was only Sarah's writing that kept me going.
I'm all for redeeming characters who have been villains in the previous books, and I've read it many times where it's been done well! But in this one it was just a little disappointing. It's not just Devil, Ewan and their wives who were affected because of Ewan's actions, but a few innocent workers had also paid the price. They just mention that a few times and leave it at that, because what's important is that Grace, the other two Bareknuckle Bastards and their wives have forgiven him. *shrugs* That's just a little biased. He didn't have to work much for it and most of it could have been solved with proper communication.
We do get to see a few scenes from the past and how much Ewan and Grace have both missed each other.
“I missed you too much,” he whispered, the words so soft that if they hadn’t been entwined, she wouldn’t have heard them. But she did, along with the truth in his voice.
“Every day, every hour. I missed you.” A pause, and then, “To say I have missed you—it’s not enough. The word . . . it implies a natural occurrence. It suggests that if only I’d been home the day you called . . . if only you’d been on St. James’s the last time I bought cravats . . . then I’d have had a chance not to miss you. But what do we call the aching emptiness that I feel for you? All the time? Every day?”
But I wish this could have made up for the lack of the other things in the book, but it didn't for me. Georgiana/Chase from Never Judge A Lady by her Cover still remains one of my favorite female protagonists that SM has written and that book was also a perfect conclusion to the series!
I'm hoping that I love Sarah's next series as much as I loved her older books, unlike this one. But, if you haven't had any of the problems that I did with the previous two books in this series then I think you might enjoy Daring and the Duke.
*I was provided with an ARC via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review*
New York Times, Washington Post & USA Today bestseller Sarah MacLean is the author of historical romance novels that have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Sarah is a leading advocate for the romance genre, speaking widely on its place at the nexus of gender and cultural studies. A romance columnist and co-host of the weekly romance novel podcast, Fated Mates, her work in support of romance and the women who read it earned her a place on Jezebel.com's Sheroes list and led Entertainment Weekly to call her "the elegantly fuming, utterly intoxicating queen of historical romance." Sarah is a graduate of Smith College & Harvard University. She lives in New York City.
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