Cold-Hearted Rake - Lisa Kleypas

My review got chewed up by GoodReads. The pain is real.

The short version: if you can get past the first 100 lackluster pages and lower your expectations, the book isn't too terrible. I hated the hero and the heroine for a good measure of the book. They didn't have an ounce of chemistry for those first 100 pages. Hell, the heroine had more chemistry with her horse than with the hero. They fall in love completely out of nowhere. While the sexual chemistry appears late in the game, it is there and it is pretty steamy.

The secondary characters (West is the best, Helen is a sweetheart and Hamlet is so cute) save the book from being a total disaster.

The book felt like a giant prequel for the second book, with the main couple at times taking a backseat to Helen and Winterborne. After what Winterborne did near the end, I have my reservations about him, but because I am trash, I'm reading the second book.