Book 18: One Dance With a Duke

It's always a Duke, isn't it? So rarely One Dance With an Accountant. Sorry, accountants. I'm sure you're lovely. This book is the first in the execrably named Stud Club series. This is the first pick for the Smart Bitches summer reading club, which I inexpertly linked in the sidebar. (I can haz tek support?) Overall, I quite liked the story, but the hook for the series as a whole is sort of lame. But what do I know? I don't follow sports of any era.

The Duke in of the title is Spencer, who wants to get full ownership of a particular horse. He has cultivated an air of mystery about himself. The heroine is Amelia D'Orsay, a noble lady of genteel poverty, presumed to be on the shelf. OF COURSE. She's nearly twenty or somesuch nonsense.

Where was I? The Stud Club. Oh yes, there is a horse, Osiris, that was originally owned by a group of friends, and they each had a token signifying their share. The tokens could only be won and lost in games of chance, never sold or gifted. The horse has excellent bloodlines, and only token holders may breed him against their mares. Spencer wants to be the exclusive owner for mysterious reasons to be revealed later. Spencer has managed to win 6 of them in games of chance. In the last match, one of the unlucky gamesters at the table was Amelia's wastrel brother. Wastrel is Regency Speak for LOSER. He drinks too much and gambles excessively because of his tortured, tortured soul.

One of the 4 other token holders was killed after a boxing match in a dodgy neighborhood. One token holder feels responsible because he had ditched him. The other toke holder thinks Spencer offed the dead one. Spencer and Amelia get backed into the parson's noose. Every one is worried about the dead guy's deaf sister. After the wedding, the newly married strangers go off to rusticate in the country. Amelia hates riding horses. Spencer's teenaged ward hates Amelia. Spencer hates the other token holders. Jack needs more money. Spencer's other horse is ill tempered and moody. It goes on and on and on. I don't even remember who killed the dead guy!

The romance part of the story was good. Spark, humor, gradually coming to understand each other. A little ripping off of the clothes. Just too many threads in this one in order to plot out general direction of the other 3 books. It seemed to me that because this is the first of a series, another character in the book pretty much had to die. Besides the dead guy at the opener.

This was the first Tessa Dare book I've read, and I did actually go ahead and grab another title by her from the library.

I read this one as an Ebook that I downloaded from www.allromanceebooks.com in the Adobe digital editions pdf format. I read ebooks on a Dell Mini 10. The reading quality is not at all taxing to my really terrible eyes. (Dry, old, at a computer for far too many hours per work day.) The price was a bit higher than Amazon, but the book club has a rebate going on for participants which edges them out on price by the end of it all. Download was just as easy as the ebooks I get from the Omaha Public Library. All Romance has a much bigger selection of the really, really smutty ebooks than Amazon does. I wish they had a little better cross referencing. I am not sure how to say this without really, really putting too much out there. You can't adequately search for nuances of sexual proclivities besides orientation. Some Stuff I Don't Care To Read. At the same time, a tag cloud on a site that sells erotica would probably be pretty funny. Especially when you factor in the terrible spelling of others. What the hell is throbbingpens?