Misadventures in Matchmaking Book 1
I’ve not read anything by this author before and I’m looking forward to something new.
In the acknowledgments, the author describes it as The Bourne Identity meets Jane Austen’s Emma. The heroine is even called Jacinda Bourne. Now, while I like the Bourne films, I’ve never read the books. Plus, I was never really keen on Emma Woodhouse. This did not bode well, but I kept an open mind.
Crispin Montague, Earl Of Rydstrom, needs a wife. Anyone rich will do in order to please his aunt and inherit her money. What he doesn’t want is a woman prying into his personal business.
Jacinda Bourne works for her family’s matchmaking agency. Crispin has employed their services, but she has taken it upon herself to find out more about him. She believes he’s hiding something and refuses to match him with some innocent, unsuspecting dubutante. She abhors unequal marriage after her father abandoned her and her sisters, and after, her mother died of a broken heart.
I quickly found myself rolling my eyes at the plot. She heads off to his estate to uncover his secrets with annoyingly self-righteous indignation. Somehow, she ends up washed up in the beach on his estate with amnesia. The reader is not told why the hell was she on a boat in the first place, but hey, moving on. As soon as she is well, she immediately borrows a servants clothes and starts rooting about his house. She can’t be sent home because there is a storm and the roads are flooded.
Just like Emma Woodhouse, Jacinda is nosy, interfering, and full of her own self-righteous morality. It’s annoying rather than cute. There’s also a case of insta-lust on both sides (urgh). However, she does subtly morph into someone more likeable as the story progresses. Crispin is a brooding, scowling hero who saves his smiles for those he loves. He’s one of my favourite hero types, the grumpy, reformed rake who falls hopelessly in love when he meets the right woman.
While she’s recuperating and trying to regain her memory, the MCs grow to love one another, despite knowing that they cannot marry because he needs an heiress and she has nothing. They have some nice, tender moments, but the heat and steam is mid-scale.
There are some quite nice swoon-worthy moments too:
“What are you doing?” She’d asked, watching in the low flicker of candlelight as he tugged the gold silk thread from his banyan and began to wind it around her finger.
“I should think it obvious. I’m tying a string around your finger so that you cannot forget that you are mine.”
Obviously, the reader is waiting in anticipation for when she regains her memory and it all falls apart, but that just adds to the tension of the story. Which, despite my earlier complaints regarding plot, and Jacinda, became much more enjoyable as the story progressed.
Plot: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Feels: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Heat: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
