Oddly enough, where I ran into difficulty with this one was with the power dynamics. The heroine is a divorcee; rumors about her abound in high society and she's considered something of a maneater. In fact, she's lived a retiring, virtuous life since her ex-husband framed her for adultery; the scandal upsets her and she wants mostly to be left alone. The hero pursues her with the intent of making her his mistress, very publicly. This... kind of sucks. The fact that she finds him attractive doesn't make it suck any less. He sets her up in situations where she is assumed to be his mistress, and he doesn't care about what this does to her reputation. I had serious difficulty getting past this. If the heroine were a little more devil-may-care or burned-out on the idea of being proper while rumors are constantly spread to the contrary, I'd have less of a problem with it, but she wasn't, at least until the romance was well underway. The writing and characterization were strong which is part of the reason I had so many problems with this plot aspect.

Anyway, eventually the book kind of... devolves into very standard romance-land plot, which I thought was also unfortunate. We are introduced to the hero's giant and unrealistically loving and accepting family, most of whom are undoubtedly the protagonists of past or future novels; we are introduced to the heroine's terrible ex-husband, who is essentially Meanyface McPlotDevice. Warren has a very good sense of place and time and her characterizations are good, which is part of the reason I was hoping this would be something exceptional - but it seemed pretty bound by standard romance tropes (it's ok if the hero pursues a woman in a way that would be creepy in the real world, the rules of high society need to stop working in pursuit of happily-ever-after, and there has to be a Bad Guy) which brought it down to just ok.