It was cold, they were trapped…and Rory Buchanan had made love to a perfect stranger and enjoyed it way more than she should have. But how was a regular girl from Whitehorse supposed to know the royal protocol for dealing with a fantasy one-night stand?
It soon became clear that Devlin Barrow would slay any dragon for local girl Rory — a court full of nobles had even descended on the small Montana community. But this relationship was no fairy tale. Because someone was willing to kill to keep Devlin’s secret past from toppling the royal hierarchy. And with Rory pregnant with his surprise heir, her life was at stake as well.
This contemporary romance novel by the talented B.J. Daniels is being offered as a freebie in bookstores right now (or rather, the price on the one I picked up at Borders is $.01, which should fit nicely into everyone’s book budget this month). I was unable to find any pictures of the current cover, the picture attached here is of the 2008 cover. The current cover is, for lack of a better term, a crotch shot. “This one’s for the ladies.” It’s a guy in jeans and a dress shirt but only from navel to knee, mostly focused on his big, gold belt buckle. I sure wish I could find a picture – it makes me laugh. [Edit: I found it!]
Montana Royalty, by B.J. Daniels is an offerng from Harlequin Intrigue which attempts to bridge the divide between historical romances and contemporary romances by importing a European castle, complete with its princess, prince, ladies in waiting, and full stable with assorted stablehands and groomsmen to rural Montana. Rory Buchanan is a local rancher, struggling to maintain her family’s ancestral ranch while all the local ranches have sold out to the princess, who has been buying up all the property to build her little Montana empire. Rory sneaks onto the royal property to scout out the competition and gets caught in a snowstorm with a hypothermic and ruggedly handsome man who she assumes is a royal groomsman. They spend the night in a line cabin, she warms him up, they make passionate love, and she slips away before the sun is up. The reader then learns that poor Devlin Barrow was drugged and doesn’t remember the previous night at all and is, in fact, a royal groomsman. Which was odd, I thought, since it seemed like the author was creating a big setup to reveal that he was a prince. And then he’s not.
Maybe I’m the wrong audience, since I’m not a Regency fan, but I found the setup to be ridiculously farfetched. I suppose I would have been willing to accept the royalty aspect if it had furthered the romance between the two main characters, but Devlin being stuck on the grounds of the castle, catering to the prince and princess’s whims while trying to solve his mystery, and Rory being on her own ranch and not knowing a thing about his mystery or being asked to help him in any way meant that the two of them barely had any scenes together until she created some harebrained scheme to break into the castle for something she probably didn’t even need in the first place. No spoilers, I promise. I actually think B.J. Daniels is a good writer, but the pomp and circumstance of the royalty and the evil machinations of the princess, told from the princess’s point of view, did not even slightly advance the main story, i.e. the romance between Rory and Devlin. I am too lazy to do a page count, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the B-story (mad-for-power princess wants a baby) and the C-story (Rory’s crazy deputy stalker) have more pages than Rory and Devlin do. And the C-story isn’t a spoiler either, I promise – that mystery is revealed to the audience on page one!! So much for Intrigue.
NOTE: As I am in the process of writing our first romance novel, I obviously assume that I will make none of the mistakes made by the highly respected authors that I am reviewing. The craft that has taken them years to stretch and hone and perfect will take me no more than three months. (Dear Trolls: This is sarcasm, used to imply that I am fully aware of how difficult it is to write a good novel.)
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