Review: Dangerous

Dangerous by Minerva Spencer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Euphemia (Mia) Marlington has just returned to the UK after nearly two decades in the harem of Sultan Babba Hassan in Oran where she bore him a son. Now her father, the Duke of Carlisle, is trying to marry her off, but with her age and her murky unknown past the available men of the right pedigree are sparse and mainly consist of the bankrupt, the decrepit, the deviant and/or the insane.

Adam, the Marquess of Exley is an outcast from polite aristocratic society and is widely believed to have murdered both his two wives. He has three daughters by his first wife but needs an heir to secure the line. When he is invited by the Duke of Carlisle to a ball in honour of Mia he sees an opportunity for a marriage of convenience, they will conceive a male heir and then he will leave her alone.

Soon Mia's unconventional life makes Adam's plan a distant memory. She is sensual, open about her secual desires and far too tempting. But the newly-weds each have a secret, one that threatens to tear them apart just as they begin to fall in love.

I know that many thousands of Europeans were kidnapped, ransomed and/or forced into harems for several hundreds of years - it still makes a fantastic romantic read, with all those inferences about exotic sexual practices and blood-thirsty corsairs.

This was a rip-roaring romance with exotic locations, plenty of steamy encounters between the newly-weds, engaging characters and a fast-paced plot. Loved it.

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