The Deed by Lynsay Sands

I'm not so sure about this one.
This was an alternate selection for my Author of the Month read. Lynsay Sands was chosen as the AOM in my yahoo reading group and I had every intentions of finally sinking my teeth (yes, pun intended) into Quick Bite, the latest installment in Sand's Argeneau series about a vampire family. The thing was that when I went out to look for the darn book in the TBR pile I could not find it. ARG!!! I lent it to my daughter Dre and I could have sworn she brought it back home during her spring break but I tore the house apart and couldn't find it. So, I settled for this one.

Lady Emma has a problem and she has gone off to court to have the King help her. Her husband has not bedded her. After two years of a marriage unconsummated she decided she needed help from the high court. But her husband dies before he can get around to performing "the deed' and leaves the estate in perilous condition with a cousin itching to take over the Duke's duty. The king, aware of the political conspiracies taking place in court, wants a man he can trust taking over the previous lord lands.

Amaury de Aneford, a landless knight who has proven himself true to the king has been given both Emma and her lands. He thinks she must be an old hag if the previous lord couldn't bring himself to bed her but is pleasantly surprised when this assumption proves wrong. There is a race to see the marriage consummated to avoid claims on the land later on and this scene is quite funny. But then we see how Amaury really has no clue as to what a woman might need or how to begin to treat a wife.

Add to the mix the fact that Bertrand, the cousin who aspires to inherit the lands, is trying to kill him and we have a new lord that is up to his neck in chaos.

The book was entertaining but I found that the hero's backward thoughts on woman kind of rubbed me the wrong way. And the heroine's naivete was a bit too much. I think if I was more in a forgiving mood I might have accepted that she was so ignorant of the ways between men and woman but I wasn't really very forgiving. At first I found it funny but then it just added to the grating of my nerves. So in truth I think that this book suffered from my mood and not really of content issues, so I gave it a higher grade than I wanted to give it (C+) because I realize that if I had initially setout to read this story I might have found it more enjoyable,

Grade: B-