Reviews for Home for the holidays
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Bent on revenge, Vincent Everett will stop at nothing to destroy the man he believes destroyed his brother. In fact, he will go so far as to evict his enemy's ill son and daughter just before the holidays. Appalled by his employer's heartlessness, Everett's secretary quits after serving the eviction notice, forcing Everett to reevaluate his cruel act. Then, upon seeing Larissa Ascot, his beautiful and innocent victim, Everett decides to take her virtue as another way to punish her father but finds that he is drawn to her in a way no other woman has ever captivated him. Everett moves both young Ascots into his own home where he finds friendship and family warmth for the first time. He eventually evokes such passion in Larissa that she surrenders her virginity, assuming he means to marry her and not knowing that she has unwittingly fallen in with his plans to ruin her missing father. But, as is fitting in a holiday story and a romance, all is well that ends well. Lindsey's latest is not as powerful or passionate as many of her previous romances, but her fans will devour it happily just the same. --Diana Tixier Herald
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Regency fluff that might be retitled The Seduction, since at heart its greatest allure is sex, not the Christmas season. The publisher is puffing Lindsey?s 37th romance, many of its predecessors (54 million copies in print around the world) having rung the New York Times?s #1 bestseller bell, as a sentimental Yuletide heartwarmer. Few of the author?s most ardent fans, though, will see it as other than a piece of pale eroticism with an ending more forced than miraculous. Vincent Everett, Baron Everett of Windsmoor, a canny trader, feels that his brother Albert has been driven into exile, if not to death, by shipping trader George Ascot, who?s gone to the colonies to find new markets. Widower Ascot leaves behind his virgin daughter Larissa and ten-year-old son Thomas to care for their large London house. But Ascot has been gone too long, and panicked creditors demand and take all the funds Larissa has for caring for the house. Lord Everett, meanwhile, bent on avenging his brother, buys up the Ascot property from the realtor who holds the family?s mortgage and instantly forecloses. At his first sight of Larissa, however, he seeks an even stronger vengeance on Ascot by seducing his ecstatically beautiful daughter. So the ravishingly handsome and muscular Everett, 29, clearly a rake who has had numberless bed partners, offers the penniless Larissa and Thomas lodgings at his own fancy digs?her bedroom, in fact, now adjoins his. Not only does Everett want to deflower Larissa in his late brother?s memory, but he finds her seduction much to his own vile taste. When news comes that Larissa?s father is dead, Lord Everett makes his move, and the grieving but bewitched Larissa is soon, well, ?feeling him buried deep within her.? With no intent to marry, mind you. And if, miraculously, this rake should marry her, promising fidelity eternal, what reader will believe him? Sex and Christian warmth to ring up cash-register rhapsodies.
