FROM CHIRP: Twenty-year-old Jessie Warfield is branded a disgrace for riding as a jockey on her father’s racehorses, wearing men’s clothing, exposing her skin to the sun and, in general, not acting like a lady at all.

James Wyndham, eligible widower and owner of a nearby horse farm, is Jessie’s rival on the race track. Outwardly competitive to the extreme with James, she is secretly in love with him. James, having known her since she was fourteen, sees her only as a little sister and a bratty one at that.

Together they are the unlikeliest romantic duo among their native Baltimore riding set. When Jessie sets out to protect James from a marriage entrapment, she ends up compromising her own reputation and is pressured into leaving town. She flees to an unlikely haven: the estate of James’s British cousins, the Earl and “Duchess” of Chase. There she is pampered, dressed, and transformed into a lady. Smitten by the new Jessie, James proposes and they marry.

Their new, shared passion results in hideous nightmares-nightmares that soon reveal themselves to be recovered memories of a long-ago attempted rape and murder. When connections are made between those events and the pirate Blackbeard’s diaries, the hunt is on for his buried treasure.

didn't think I would like this but i did. will try more of her historical romance. ( )

There really was not much chemistry between the main characters, Jessie and James, in this romance, so I felt sorry for them both that they felt so pressured to marry anyway. This story seemed more like a romantic tragedy than a romance, two dysfunctional families trapping their children into an unfortunate marriage where the best that can be said about it is that the young couple doesn't have to live with the in-laws on either side. So, as a romance this book failed miserably in my opinion, but as an illustration of how sexist standards put men and women both in unfair positions, this was a decent novel. The story is written as historical fiction, though I am not sure how historically accurate it is. The sexual standards and stereotypes are mostly tapping into the values of the time the story is set in, though James seemed a bit out of place as a result. Obviously a romance in which the women are not supposed to experience orgasms or any overt sexual desire would be a very poorly performing novel in the romance market, so James would have to teach his wife at least as much about typical romance novel style sex as possible, but it seemed like a very modern romance as a result, at least where sex scenes were concerned.

As a romance, this novel shows how unfair it is in societies that insist women are not allowed to know about sex until they are married. I appreciated the feminist angle that Jessie is a female jockey, and quite capable of participating in the pirate treasure adventure near the end of the book, even though I'd rather have seen her as more than just a damsel in distress needing rescue in this part of the novel. Overall, as a bit of light reading, this was an ok book, but not one of my favorites. ( )

Good not great. Fairly typical historical romance. ( )

This is one of my favorite romances. I love the way Coutler writes the evolution of Jessie and James' relationship. I agree with saucecav in the fact that this story provides the perfect touch of mystery and romance. I've read it countless times and will continue to do so in the future. ( )