Anna Campbell
Midnight’s Wild Passion
Avon, April 26, 2011, $7.99 (print and digital)
London’s most notorious seducer, Nicholas Challoner lives solely for revenge . . .
The dashing, licentious Marquess of Ranelaw can never forgive Godfrey Demarest for ruining his sister—now the time has come to repay the villain in the same coin. But one formidably intriguing impediment stands in the way of Nicholas’s vengeance: Miss Antonia Smith, companion to his foe’s unsuspecting daughter.
Having herself been deceived and disgraced by a rogue—banished by her privileged family as a result and forced to live a lie—Antonia vows to protect her charge from the same cruel fate. She recognizes Ranelaw for the shameless blackguard he is and will devote every ounce of her intelligence and resolve to thwarting him.
Yet Antonia has always had a fatal weakness for rakes . . .
What Goes Around Comes Around
The three supremely pissed off women you see to the right are the Furies, attacking Orestes for killing his mother Clitemnestra. They were the goddesses of revenge and justice, created from the blood of Uranus when his son Cronus castrated him to avenge his siblings’ death. Look closely, and you’ll see snakes woven into their hair—what you can’t see is their stanky breath and the poisonous blood that often dripped from their eyes. Their lust for vengeance, to punish the guilty, was insatiable.
The point of that little lesson in Greek mythology is a reminder that the revenge motive is one of the oldest in art and literature. Romance novels are filled with revenge. Anna Campbell’s new historical is among them and because of its lack of originality in that regard, I didn’t like Midnight’s Wild Passion quite as much as I did her 2009 release, the more inventive Captive of Sin. And yet...
Nicholas Challoner, Marquess of Ranelaw, watched his beautiful and vibrant half-sister despoiled by Godfrey Demarest, who viewed her as fair game because of her illegitimacy. Ranelaw plans to debauch Demarest’s beautiful daughter Cassie, but her bespectacled, drably dressed and fiery mouthed companion is onto him even before their introduction. Ranelaw, though, quickly adjusts his plans. The refreshing Miss Smith appeals to him, so before he moves on to Cassie, he decides to have his way with her first, as “his reward for ruining the poppet” (which he likens to “fucking a meringue”) and then use their dalliance as a form of blackmail to further his pursuit of Cassie.
Underneath her disguise, Lady Antonia Hilliard is a stunning beauty. Ten years earlier she’d been ruined by a rake. Her position is precarious; though Cassie and her father (her distant relatives) shelter her from her past, should she be anything less than entirely circumspect, she knows she’d lose her cousin’s protection. And she better than anyone knows what giving in to Ranelaw might cost her, which brings a decade of bitterness to the surface:
His nonchalance caught her on the raw. Anger rescued her from tumbling into beguilement. Anger she’d crammed deep inside for years. It was so easy for men like Ranelaw. No consequences. No dangers. Their swaggering left a bloody trail of broken hearts and lives, but what did they care as long as they satisfied their selfish desires?
Although she doesn’t reveal her thoughts to him, the moment I read the above paragraph, I thought back to Patricia Oliver’s An Inconvenient Wife (1998), which features perhaps the best set-down of a rake...ever.
“And pray, whatever gave you the notion that you would make a good husband, my lord?” she said coolly. “Have you ever assessed your worth in terms other than rank and fortune? Take those away - and believe me I value neither of them - what is left? An aging roué who spends his life in the pursuit of dissipation and debauchery in all their most disgusting forms...What sensible female would consider such a man an eligible match?”
Both snippets describe the rake as he really is, not as we often romanticize him. The rake has all the fun while his victim is left holding her fun bags. And it’s this reality that drives Nicholas, that resulted in Antonia’s ruin, and that Nicholas experiences from the other side when he learns what took the light from Antonia’s eyes. “The mongrel deserved to roast in the lowest circle of hell. What right had he to place his hands on Antonia?”
I love this sort of symmetry in a book. Sometimes the POV moves at the end of one chapter to the start of another in a manner that reminds me of watching a merry-go-round (for a visual idea of what I mean, Five for Fighting’s “100 Years” video may work). That doesn’t happen here, but Campbell’s expert use of symmetry in her plotline fails only in that it takes Nicholas too long to put two and two together. He can’t wait to lead the poppet down the road to ruin, but it escapes him that his growing obsession with Antonia may ruin her. In other words, he behaves like rakes behave. Antonia, on the other hand, is keenly aware: “He didn’t care that his actions could destroy her. She mattered less to him than the dirt beneath his feet.”
And yet, when he finally gets a clue, it’s wondrous to read, even if his inkling begins with a goad:
“Such passion, Antonia...it makes a man hunger to seize you in hs arms. You’d go up like fire.”
The light dimmed in her ice blue eyes and her mouth flattened with what he recognized was shame. Sour anger stirred in Ranelaw’s gut. Someone somewhere had taught her to loathe the thrilling woman she was.
If his goal is to teach her otherwise, he soon does, but rather than continue their dalliance, as he expects, she flees. When he confronts her at a ball, she’s certain he plans to continue his games with her. Instead, his goal is to protect—now that he knows the truth about her history—and after Antonia realizes he knows she’s “a whore,” as she baldly puts it...
His gut coiled with crippling grief. Her suffering shredded him to ribbons. The protectiveness he’d always refused to acknowledge surged like a boiling wave. He’d rather cut off his own arm than hear her denigrate herself.
I liked watching Nicholas Challoner tranform from heartless rake to loving man, and over the years I’ve fallen for many a revenge romance. Unfortunately for Campbell, the best revenge romance I ever read, Anne Stuart’s Breathless, came out just last year, and remains so fresh in my mind that even good stories pale in comparison.
Stuart’s book engendered controversy (what else is new?) because the hero was such an unremitting prick. Perversely, that’s why I loved it so much, but for those who prefer less less awesome pricks, Midnight’s Wild Passion should more than suffice.
For more about this book, visit www.annacampbell.com.
Laurie Gold cannot stop reading and writing about romance—she’s been blabbing online for years. She remains a work in progress. Be one of the few who visits her at Toe in the Water or follow her may-be-too-political-for-you tweets at @laurie_gold.
