When I really love an author, I often try to pace out diving into their back list as much as my own self-control will allow, leaving me with some guaranteed, go-to winners for when I really need them. This strategy definitely paid off with Jeannie Lin’s The Dragon and The Pearl, the second book in her China-set Tang Dynasty series. Two deliciously complex characters locked in a steamy battle of wills in a well-rendered non-European historical setting made for a very happy Ellen.

In this book, a cryptic anonymous message sends regional warlord Li Tao to collect beautiful courtesan Lady Suyin Ling, the former emperor’s consort, from her riverside estate. While he takes her away ostensibly to protect her, he does not really trust her and suspects she may know about or be involved in various plots against him. They remain locked in a dance of mistrust and attraction against the background of Li Tao’s rising tensions with the emperor and another regional warlord, General Gao, who tries to exploit the fraying relationship between Li Tao and the emperor to his advantage.

The hero of this book, Li Tao, was actually the villain of the previous book in the series, Butterfly Swords. Similarly, the heroine, Lady Ling, helped main characters Ai Li and Ryam escape the clutches of Li Tao during Butterfly Swords. While I felt that having read the first book increased my enjoyment of this one, I don’t think it’s necessary to understand what’s going on. I just thought the two books formed an interesting counterpoint to each other.

The Dragon and the Pearl has an almost Beauty and the Beast-esque feel. Suyin is basically a prisoner at the ferocious Li Tao’s isolated estate in the bamboo forest. So most of the action (such as it is) takes place in a large, sort of creepy house. Suyin makes friends with Li Tao’s servants when he is away doing warlord things, and attempts to manage Li Tao to her advantage as best as she can when they encounter each other.

I loved the two main characters and their romance. Suyin is a clever survivalist who knows how to manipulate others to protect herself. She has a level of cunning I have not often seen in a romance heroine. She thinks at one point during an encounter with Li Tao:

His gaze fixed on her so intensely, as if trying to pierce into her and pry her secrets loose. He’d find nothing there. She could fill the shell of her body with whatever spirit she needed.

Her ability to be whoever she needs to be in the moment is not ever portrayed as a bad thing, but a necessary skill she learned to protect herself in the pleasure district and then the imperial court.

For his part, Li Tao is a man prepared to believe the worst of himself, no matter how much he’s tried to do his duty by others. He prides himself on strength and discipline. Having cut off his emotions for so long, he’s initially confused and enraged by the attraction, and then the emotion, that he feels for Suyin. Early in the book, he thinks:

He would never make the mistake of thinking of Ling Suyin as a mere woman. She was a seductress and a shrewd manipulator. A she-demon in the guise of a beautiful woman.

All this manly melodrama, of course, stems from his deep sense of alarm at just how compelling he finds Lady Ling.

At its core, this book is about two incredibly lonely people who have always had to look out for themselves coming together. This sounds strange to say, but I loved how jaded they both were. Frequently in romance we see a jaded hero paired with a sunny, warm, young-feeling heroine who brings him into the light. It was a nice change to have a heroine who was just as cynical as the hero. Suyin is simply more aware of her own loneliness than Li Tao is.

Given how wary and suspicious both Suyin and Li Tao are, there is an adversarial element to the romance almost all the way through to the end. Even once they begin to sort of trust each other, they are still at odds as Suyin tries to convince Li Tao to humble himself and make peace with the emperor and Li Tao resists doing that for a number of reasons, some more frustrating than others. I would describe the overall dynamic between them as “unstoppable force meets immovable object.”

I loved almost everything about their romance, but there’s one particular thing I want to highlight: even as they grow closer, Li Tao and Suyin remain on some level mysterious to each other. This is not a romance that is founded on two people understanding each other better than they understand themselves. This push-pull between connection and distance is illustrated beautifully in the following passage:

The awareness that Li Tao was close permeated her slumbered thoughts. Once, he reached out to pull her close. She dozed off tucked against his shoulder, but they didn’t fit together as well as one would hope. They shifted apart in a haze of movement. When she finally opened her eyes, he was gone.

By the end of the book, the two characters don’t magically understand each other perfectly. They are simply committed to being together and each willing to bend a little. (Although, to be honest, it’s mostly Li Tao who needs to learn to bend.) As a generally wary and almost pathologically independent person, I deeply appreciated seeing a successful HEA between lovers who retain some slight remoteness from each other. It felt real.

I will note that this is not a very action-y book, seeing as how most of it is about two people in a house in a standoff. Some readers will probably get fed up with Li Tao’s stubbornness and start to find the stalemate between Li Tao and Suyin annoying. For me, the book went right to the limit of my tolerance for Li Tao’s pigheadedness but did not exceed it.

So I adored the two main characters and the romance. However, I had a couple of VERY specific points of annoyance that prevented this book from attaining the heights of perfection for me. Unfortunately, both of these points are kind of spoiler-y. If you don’t want spoilers, I can summarize it by saying I had minor quibbles with some of the sex and with the gender dynamics of the ultimate turning point in Li Tao’s arc. If you want more detail, spoilers ahoy!

Both of those points represent relatively minor annoyances in the grand scheme of the book, which I loved. But I think they reinforce some harmful tropes that do move the book from being squee-level to just being really good.

With all that said, The Dragon and the Pearl is an enjoyable romance between two complicated characters with an intriguing dynamic. At its core, this book is a masterful character and relationship study, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys jaded heroes and heroines with an edge, non-European historical settings, and a romance that involves an ongoing battle of wills.