Ruby Macintosh, stepdaughter of Northern Europe's biggest crime lord, is blackmailed by Lucas Bendtsen, head of Elskov's CIA equivalent, the Silver Knights, to get him into her stepfather's island and organization to stop a gun deal from going down. Their pretend engagement is to save her brother who the Silver Knights have in custody. When they get to the island, her stepfather suggests they get married on the island. They agree but Ruby has one request of Lucas--that her brother be brought to the island for the ceremony. Now Lucas is up the creek. Truths come out and Ruby and Lucas try to keep from falling in love. But it may be too late.

 

I loved this book. I loved Ruby and Lucas. She is feisty and strong. She won't take anyone's garbage. Lucas is stubborn but against Ruby he has no safety net. I was surprised by both Ruby's mother and brother. The story is hot! Both Lucas and Ruby have a lot to lose if this fails. Both need to decide what is more important--the mission or each other. What an ending!

 

I'll be looking the the other books in the series.

Nice. Very sweet. This family is a little boring, though--or maybe it's just that I read three of Kleypas's romance novels in a row on a flight to New York. Maybe my judgment is off.Regardless, I so admire how she manages to completely vary the characters who are placed within the same plot pattern template with each novel. The combination here is a bit like my husband and and me--maybe that was the source of my boredom. The next book is the one I'm really looking forward to.

Because it's Lisa freaking Kleypas, people.

Loved these MCs! The "villianous" Henry and the smart and loving Poppy. I enjoyed watching Henry have to evolve.

4.5 stars

Poppy Hathaway is the second youngest of the Hathaway siblings, and frequently wishes that her family weren't quite so unconventional and colourful. When her sister's pet ferret runs off with one of her love letters, while her family are staying at the fashionable Rutledge hotel, she is desperate to retrieve it, so the truth of her secret courtship with the promising young isn't revealed. She runs into Harry Rutledge, the enigmatic, powerful and reclusive owner of the hotel, who seems amuse and intrigued by her predicament.

While Harry may be a highly eligible bachelor, he hasn't seriously considered marriage until he meets Poppy. It doesn't take many meetings before he decides that he wants to have her, though, and he will use any trick necessary to win her, even if it means fighting very dirty indeed. Soon Poppy finds herself jilted by her gentle suitor, whose father has found out about their hopes, and not long after finds herself very publicly compromised by Harry Rutledge, who of course promises to marry her (despite assurances from her family that they'll weather the scandal and she needn't marry anyone at all), and give her everything she could have hoped or dreamed of. Except closeness and affection, as these are things Harry himself have never experienced either.

[b:Tempt Me at Twilight|6264710|Tempt Me at Twilight (The Hathaways, #3)|Lisa Kleypas|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1311970573s/6264710.jpg|6447962] is by far my favourite of the five books in this series. Harry is a wonderful anti-hero, almost, but not quite rivalling [a:Lisa Kleypas|27847|Lisa Kleypas|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1288899037p2/27847.jpg]' most wonderful villainous hero, Sebastian St. Vincent in [b:Devil in Winter|114166|Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3)|Lisa Kleypas|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309220205s/114166.jpg|1823830]. Harry is ruthless, manipulative and brilliant, not caring one bit if he has to break Poppy's heart in order to win her hand. Successful at pretty much everything he turns his hand to, with a small army of extremely loyal staff, he get what he wants, through any means necessary. Poppy discovers the full extent to his perfidy shortly before she is about to walk down the aisle, but chooses to marry him anyway. Of course, she swears she'll never love him, but we all know how likely that is, right?

Of course, Harry is such a cold-hearted villain because his mother left him when he was four, and his father treated him like dirt. Having devoted himself completely to his work since he was old enough to strike out for himself, Harry is completely unprepared for what it's like to share his personal space with a wife, especially one who's used to a close, supportive and loving family. She completely refuses to listen to him when he forbids her to befriend the hotel staff and treat them more like friends than employees.

The main plot is obviously concerned with how Harry and Poppy find a way to make their marriage work, and a very enjoyable read, it is, but there is also a sub-plot involving the younger Hathaway sisters' governess, the mysterious Miss Marks, who has some sort of connection to Harry Rutledge (she's extremely against the match, and determined that Poppy not marry him). The antagonistic relationship between Leo Hathaway and Miss Marks seem to be escalating as the book goes on, and the epilogue makes it clear that they are the couple to find love in the next book. The only reason I'm not giving this book five stars is because Kleypas insists on inserting a really unnecessary kidnapping plot towards the end of the book, where Poppy has to work with her brother and the various hotel employees to rescue her husband from a nefarious scheme. While it was nice that the heroine gets to be the rescuer, for a change, the episode brings nothing further to the story, and I think the book would have been better off without it.