A Rose in Winter and The Promise of Rain by Shana Abe

These are two earlier (I think her earliest) books of Abe’s. Both are Medievals, and I think Abe is definitely better suited for the Medieval setting than later settings.

In A Rose in Winter, Solange and Damon were Young And In Love, but he was poor and her father promised to help him reclaim his lands if she’d dump him and marry Creepy Older Guy. So she dumped him and married Creepy Older Guy, who was an alchemist who kept her prisoner and used her blood in experiments. Because women can NEVER dump the hero and end up with someone who isn’t an abuser, much less decent. Anyway, dad dies and sends Damon to tell Solange, and she’s all “Oh, my husband? He’s actually JUST NOW GONE. I mean DEAD. Which I had nothing to do with. It’s tragic. We should totally run off back to England NOW. Let me bat my eyes to keep you from thinking about this too much.” To which he goes “I am angry that you dumped me and your father lied to me about it and I should be really suspicious but you bat your eyes so prettily.”

It really feels like a first book, and a lot of it is forgettable, but it has some interesting bits, and Solange is very much a prototype for Abe’s icy, isolated heroines. Which, combined with the not-quite-typical plots, are why I put up with her annoy alpha heroes. Damon was actually much less alpha than I was expecting based on Abe’s later heroes, but made up for it with “me man, you woman, you stay in room unless I say otherwise!” near the end.

In The Promise of Rain, Kyla and her brother are in hiding because their father was accused of murdering their mother and her supposed lover, and the king thinks he’s still with them, and Roland, aka, Future True Love, has been sent to bring him in. The book opens with failed crossdressing, and then flashes back to Kyla’s 11~ brother dying in an attack supposedly instigated by Warwick. There’s bickering as he drags her back to the king, then Abe conveniently forgets about the part where he’s supposedly responsible for her brother’s death for about 150 pages, only to have them suddenly remember it just when things were getting comfy.

I actually read this first, and was surprised by the tolerable levels of controlling-alpha-male for a good while there, especially given that the plot would be iffy even with an author I trusted a lot more. And then “me man, you woman, you not move an inch FOR YOUR OWN GOOD” showed up and kinda took over near the end. Oy.