Heiress Bride

Heiress Bride was the second book by this author I read, back to back, purely by accident. The blurb drew me: scarred heroine and equally emotionally scare half Indian hero brought together by a matchmaker.

Most of the POV for this story was from the heroine’s perspective, with only the occasional insight into the thoughts of the hero. For that reason, the tension was well developed. Just as in real life, the reader has to go on what she is told and what she surmises of the hero’s thoughts and feelings to get his motivations. And when Nathan informs Ella after their wonderful first time together, and he’s taken her virginity, that he can’t love her, that he’s incapable of love, I really felt for her.  

Now this is the exact plot device used in the last book. Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the sameness of it, and the scenario of the bad guy secretly trying to kill her, if I’d read a few books by other authors between. But going from one to the next, and finding this less-than-appealing quality in both heroes, I was disappointed. Yes, it gives the heroine something to aim for: getting the hero to fall for her. But with that one cruel announcement I lost any real interest in Nathan, just as I had with Duncan.

Anyway, even though I was turned off by Nathan, who really wasn’t enough of an Indian for my liking anyway, I continued reading because I quite liked Ella. She embraced her new life as a rancher’s wife and worked her fingers to the bone to be the woman he needed. Maybe she oscillated a bit over whether she loved him or not, telling him and others that she did and then denying it later, but she was a woman with courage and determination, a woman who could embrace an illegitimate brother her father kept secret all his life, and then hit him with a bucket when he threatened her life. I liked her development.

And of course she gets the love of her man, and some very exciting sex along the way. So it was a satisfying conclusion. It just would have been more so if Nathan had been more sympathetic as a character. So, he fell in love when he was young, and she rejected him because he was half Indian. That doesn’t mean you marry a damaged woman so you can have kids and tell her after sex that he’ll never love her. That’s just awful. But that’s probably my own preference in heroes.