Wicked!

Not the book or play by that title. I'm talking about romance novels again.

I just read a really really good one, which was more of a mystery novel and which I loved the socks off of. Unfortunately, it's called If His Kiss is Wicked and has a picture of an unshaven man on the front - no man-titty, luckily, but a 100-yard stare or maybe Jesus gazing to heaven or something - and the hero is never unshaven throughout the book. The title and the picture have NOTHING to do with the book.

And this is by Jo Goodman, not to be confused with Foley's His Wicked Kiss, or even Goodman's own Beyond a Wicked Kiss (which the library only has on CD, which does me no good at all), or any of a zillion other romance novels with Wicked in the title.

So who came up with the title?

I mean: If his kiss is wicked, Then what? He's not wicked, his kisses aren't wicked, he kisses her a couple of times and it's fabulous and then they get married. OK, so they get married really quickly, but it's still before they go and have hot sex (I'll tape the pages together for you, Mom). And after that, they start to sort out the mystery and understand each other and fall in love for real.

But the main thrust (HAR!) of the novel is the aftermath of the kidnapping and brutal beating (luckily, not raping, though that is the only bright spot and I know that, historically speaking as this is a historical novel, the deflowering of virgins is Going Too Far, but these were brutal kidnappers, three men who didn't even ask for a ransom, so why they wouldn't have raped her is actually hard to fathom and never gets questioned) of Emma, who lives with her artist uncle and his daughter. She's definitely having post-traumatic stress and she has big gaps in her memory of the abduction and her escape. She goes to the hero, Restell Gardner (I think that's right. I didn't get used to the name), because he is rumored to be able to investigate and protect. She thinks the attack might have been meant for her cousin.

And then the can of worms is opened...

You know, I keep finding weaknesses in the plot and in some of the characterization, things I wish Goodman had explained better or something, but I still heartily enjoyed it.

This seems to be a book in a series because there's an overload of relatives who keep showing up all happily married and joyful and having abundant offspring, though trying to figure out where all these siblings and step-siblings come in by reading the blurbs on amazon is doing in my head, so I'm just requesting what I can from the library, even though I'm pretty sure some of these books aren't in the same series.