Ravished By Amanda Quick

Summary

Ravished has been on my TBR pile for quite a while. It ended up being my very first read by the prolific and much-loved Amanda Quick (aka Jayne Ann Krentz, Jayne Castle, et. al.). Overall, I very much enjoyed this tale that has a Beauty and the Beast theme. It’s light and witty, while also expressing some deeper emotions, particularly for our hero who’s been through quite a lot. It also contains a couple of light mysteries surrounding exactly what happened six years earlier when the hero called off his engagement and became known as the Beast of Blackthorne Hall, as well as the identity of the leader of a band of thieves who are leaving stolen loot in the cliff-side caves frequented by our fossil-hunting heroine. There was a lot going on to hold my attention in this story that travels from the provincial charm of the seaside town of Upper Biddleton to the glitz and glitter of the ton in London. Other than a few minor flaws, which I’ll get to shortly, I found it to be a great story that was sweet, enchanting, and full of heart.

Harriet is the daughter of the former rector of Upper Biddleton. Both he and her mother passed away, so she lives with her younger sister and a widowed aunt. At twenty-five, she’s pretty much a firmly on the shelf spinster, who has no real intention of getting married. She’s far more interested in collecting and identifying fossils than ballrooms and fashions or finding a husband. When she discovers that thieves are hiding stolen goods in the caves where she hunts for her fossils, she knows she must put a stop to it immediately to prevent some other fossil-hunter from making a monumental discovery first. To that end, she summons the Viscount who owns the land, asking him to intervene. When Gideon shows up, Harriet finds him attractive but a bit too autocratic. However, when he does help her, she’s quite grateful. Due to some misadventures during the capture of the thieves, the pair find themselves trapped in one of the caves overnight, which of course, leads to Harriet being compromised with a hasty engagement and marriage to follow.

Harriet is a geek of the first order with a one-track mind regarding her fossils, but rather than being the typical nerdy introvert, she’s the type who talks incessantly, which can be amusing. She also has very strong opinions, which she isn’t afraid to share, particularly with Gideon, while having an underdeveloped sense of her own mortality, which at times, nearly drives Gideon crazy with worry over her. Harriet is very even-tempered and has a matter-of-fact way of looking at almost everything. In fact, she’s a bright ray of sunshine in Gideon’s dark, cave-like existence. The thing I loved about her the most, though, is that she believes in Gideon right from the start and never wavers in her trust in him. The way she’s constantly defending him is almost comical, but at the same time, very endearing. She’s definitely a unique heroine who is full of life and vitality. I’d say the only thing that gave me pause about her is that I found it difficult to believe that anyone could be as perky and optimistic all the time as she is, but I’ll allow that it did make her a very cute and humorous character.

Gideon hasn’t been active in society for the past six years. For starters, in his wild youth, he’d engaged in a drunken duel that was supposed to be all for fun, but which left him with an ugly scar down one side of his face. Few young ladies paid him any attention after that, most finding his countenance hideous. He fell for the beautiful daughter of the former rector and offered for her hand in marriage. But according to the rumors run amok in society, he got her pregnant and broke the engagement, which led to her committing suicide. He’s been an outcast dubbed The Beast of Blackthorne Hall ever since. Even his relationship with his parents is a troubled one, since they’d shown preference to his older brother, who died in an accident, and they also seem to believe the rumors everyone else is telling rather than his own story. Gideon scarcely cares what anyone thinks of him anymore, and so he frequently does rather scandalous things. But when he meets the bossy daughter of the latest minister, who demands his assistance, he’s met his match.

Gideon is the classic, tortured, misunderstood hero, who’s had many things go wrong in his life. As a result, he’s mostly hidden himself away, but helping Harriet with her problem with the thieves revitalizes him. While he believes he’s lost the ability to love, he finds it to be no hardship to marry the lady once she’s been compromised, even though she insists it’s unnecessary. He may not understand her fascination with fossils, but what he does understand is her belief in him. He has no real friends, and no one has had his back ever since the events of six years before. Yet Harriet giving him her absolute trust reaches to a place deep inside him that he didn’t even realize was yearning for something more. Gideon may try to keep Harriet’s energy in check, but she’s an unstoppable force of nature. I loved Gideon for his sense of honor and how the loss of it has been the hardest pill to swallow. And yet, he proves his honor time and time again both by his ready acknowledgement that he would be marrying her before they ever left the cave and with his defense of her when she’s attacked by a former friend. He was a very lovable hero who I very much admired.

I had a few small issues with various things in the story. First is that, while it takes Gideon a bit longer to recognize his feelings, Harriet basically experiences insta-love for him, which doesn’t always work well for me. I couldn’t fully quiet the nagging voice in the back of my head, asking exactly what it was about Gideon that made Harriet fall for him in a matter of days and trust him completely. I was mostly OK with it, though, because the author manages to express the emotion between them pretty well. Next was that the love scenes didn’t fully have that perfect spark for me. A couple of them end abruptly, with a fade-to-black, in the middle of them making love, while some of the others just didn’t quite flow the way I would have hoped. The last thing is that I picked up on occasional repetitious words, where synonyms would have made the narrative flow better. Overall, though, these are pretty minor things in an otherwise fun tale. The story is jam-packed with colorful secondary characters who liven things up quite a bit, while also presenting some potential red herrings for the mystery portions of the plot. And I have to say that part was well-done, too. More than once, I thought I had it all figured out, only to have a little surprise twist pop up that changes everything. So all in all, Ravished was a very good read and a wonderful introduction to Amanda Quick. I look forward to trying out more of her books under whichever name she happens to be using.