An Inconvenient Ward (Inconvenient Trilogy #1) by Audrey Harrison

  

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Romance, Historical Romance
Content: A hot and heavy makeout session

 

Lord Michael Dunham is bored of Society, bored of fickle women, but above all that, he is afraid. His father suffered from madness and Michael is terrified that he will inherit the same affliction. He scrutinises his every mood swing, his every expression, to see if he can detect any signs that he is developing the symptoms. It blights his life. He has determined that he will never marry, putting a wife through the same that his mother suffered and he certainly will never have children. The disease will die with him.

Miss Elizabeth Rufford is a young lady who is more comfortable managing an estate as far away from Society as she can possibly be. She would rather being planting crops, than dancing a Quadrille, rather be building walls, than playing cards. She did not seek a London season when she came out of the schoolroom and would be happy never to visit the capital.

A line in a will force the two together. Lord Dunham is Elizabeth’s guardian whether she likes it or not, and she really does not like it! Bounding into his life in the most outrageous way possible, Elizabeth makes an impact she never intended to. Michael is drawn to the feisty woman and suddenly finds that it is hard to fight one’s demons when Elizabeth Rufford is a part of your life.

 

What is happening? This is the third book in a row that I've written a review for that I had issues with. I was in the mood to read a romance and this one was on my Kindle. I think I had gotten it for free at one time. Anyway, I decided to try it. It had me hooked from the beginning and it was going really well, despite the usual annoying romance novel tropes. Then somewhere around the halfway mark it just became utterly ridiculous. 

I enjoy a drawn out romance of the "when will they finally get together" type, but it has to be plausible. A character yearning for someone he can't have can be good in a book. It builds tension between the characters and longing for the reader. But this went on for too long and for a ridiculous reason. At some point characters need to talk to each other instead of make assumptions, and well before the end of the book. I didn't like the back and forth that we were treated to with Michael's character. Michael made some assumptions and based everything on them as if they were facts. It was incredibly annoying. The first one had to do with why he thought he couldn't be with Elizabeth. For this big assumption, all he had to do was talk to his sister. He could have done that years before the events in this book and saved himself a lot of worry and anguish. The other really annoying one had to do with why he didn't ask Elizabeth to marry him, after he had decided he would. 

Somewhere in the middle of the book, there is a pretty hot and heavy make out session between them and some confessed feelings as well, and it seemed pretty obvious how they both felt about each other at that point, so some of the assumptions and confusion about feelings later in the book didn't make much sense to me, but Elizabeth's confusion was more understandable than Michael's assumptions. He later stupidly asks Elizabeth why she needed to get away from him, and calls her a foolish girl for being confused about how he felt. By the end of the book I wanted to throw something at him! Also, the make out session was a little too much for my liking, and felt a little out of place. 

The other thing that I thought was ridiculous was the part with the plotting relatives and all that happened with that. In my opinion, it just went a bit over the top. So, 2.5 stars because I enjoyed parts of the story, but it had some pretty big flaws as well.