The Virgin and the Rogue is the sequel to The Duke’s Stolen Bride, a book I enjoyed immensely. Unfortunately I had a few issues with this novel, in part because the hero and heroine don’t spend as much of the book together as I would expect, and also because I doubted the heroine’s ability to consent the first time she engages in sexual activity with the hero.
Charlotte Langely has spent her entire life making the “right” choices, which is why she’s engaged to her childhood sweetheart William Pembroke despite feeling no passion for him. William stood by Charlotte when her circumstances were diminished after her father’s death, and she feels the right thing to do is to remain engaged to him now that her sister has married a duke and improved the family’s standing and financial situation. Unfortunately she has lukewarm feelings for William at best, and his family is truly awful to her (his mother is flat out emotionally abusive).
When her brother-in-law (the duke)’s stepbrother, Samuel Kingston, arrives to visit, he throws her world into upheaval. Kingston is a rake, and as an illegitimate son of a duke, he knows he never has to worry about inheriting a title. Instead he’s been enjoying his wealth, never settling down anywhere. Now Kingston finds himself feeling a little empty and lost. His partying ways no longer appeal to him and he’s keenly aware that he really has no home of his own. His father and stepmother are awful and his other relationships have been shallow.
The night Kingston arrives, Charlotte’s sister, a budding herbalist, gives her a new tonic to soothe her PMS symptoms, and to her horror Charlotte finds that’s effects are similar to an aphrodisiac. She encounters Kingston in the library at night and they engage in some mutually satisfying frottage. Later, after the tonic has worn off, they continue their affair.
Here is Charlotte under the effects of the tonic:
She managed to stagger from her room without collapsing. With one hand pressed on the wall of the corridor, she dragged herself down the hall toward her sister’s room. Each step was an act of labor. The hardest thing she had ever done. Walking had become a challenge.
Good heavens, she was in trouble.
All the more reason to reach Nora’s room.
She pressed on.
Her palm skimmed the wood paneling as she advanced, the cool texture under her skin doing nothing to ease her full-body burn. There was no way she could move any faster. Her legs felt leaden. The fever was too great…the throbbing in her stomach clawing now. She choked back an undignified sob.
“Are you unwell?”
The deep masculine voice shot through her like a bolt of lightning.
She jerked with a whimper, flinging her body against the wall, arms wide at her sides in a gesture of surrender.
She froze, pressing herself into the paneling as if she could somehow meld herself into the wood where she would be protected.
Her gaze found the owner of that voice. No, not him.
That dreadful man from dinner. Nathaniel’s stepbrother
His expression at dinner had alternated between boredom and contempt. She’d felt his judgement keenly. He hadn’t been impressed with her. With any of them. Clearly they did not meet his sophisticated tastes. She was relieved when, at the end of dinner, he had announced he would be leaving the next morning.
Now his expression was one of mild concern. She’d prefer he look bored again. Right now he looked far too interested in her. She did not want his interest. She wanted him gone.
Especially considering her physical state.
For some reason the throbbing between her legs tightened and twisted as he approached, closing in on her.
She shook her head. No. Go away.
The closer he drew, the greater the agony. She bit her lip until she felt the wash of blood against her teeth–and still that pain was nothing compared to her body’s torment.
Her condition seemed to be worsening the closer he drew to her. She had to get away.
She held out her hand in an attempt to ward him off–and that was its own form of anguish because she had the awful and completely foreign impulse to grab him, pull him in, bring him closer.
None of this reads to me like a woman who would be able to consent to engaging in sexual activity. Charlotte establishes that she’s miserable and that she doesn’t even like Kingston, so her sudden attraction to him feels like it’s caused by the tonic. The scene was uncomfortable to read. Later, no longer under the effects of the tonic, Charlotte continues their affair, but just because she consents later doesn’t negate the fact that I’m not sure she could the first time.
Then there’s the fact that Charlotte and Kingston don’t actually spend that much time together within the book. I did a quick count of pages when they were together and came up with 156 pages out of a 351 page novel. My number could be slightly off since I was skimming as I counted, but not substantially.
Good portions of the novel are dedicated to Charlotte’s relationships with her sisters, Nora and Marian, who are concerned about her happiness with William, and with William and his terrible family.
I had no issues believing that Charlotte and Kingston were sexually compatible, but I wasn’t sure they actually knew that much about each other by the end of the book. Charlotte learns about Kingston’s complicated and toxic relationship with his father and stepmother, and defends him in their presence. Kingston learns about how difficult things were for Charlotte and her sisters after their father died, so they do have an understanding of each other’s pasts, but they spent so much time apart, it disrupted both the romantic tension in the book and made me wonder if their HEA was realistic. It felt to me that they were basing their relationship on sexual compatibility and some affection, but emotional intimacy and depth were lacking. If anything I left the book feeling like they had a HFN, and needed to spend more time really establishing their emotional compatibility.
As a romance novel, this book didn’t work for me. I think that had it not been a romance, and instead been a novel about a woman discovering and exploring her sexual agency and realizing her engagement wasn’t for her, I would have liked it more. Much of the book is devoted to Charlotte realizing she’s been living her life for other people.
Even though I can make a case for this working as a novel about a woman finding her agency versus a romance novel, that’s clearly not the intent of the book, and it doesn’t work as a romance. Kingston becomes a tool for Charlotte to break free of the restrictions she’s imposed on her life, and his character becomes two-dimensional. All of that still doesn’t remove the issue of consent either from earlier in the book, either.
I really wanted to love The Virgin and the Rogue as much as I did The Duke’s Stolen Bride, but the romance felt underdeveloped and questions about the heroine’s ability to consent bothered me too much for it to be a success.
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Apart from the consent issue (which I totally agree on – WTF!), I don’t think that’s how any aphrodisiac works. I know there’s plenty other unrealistic stuff in historical romance novels, but for some reason that’s where I draw my line. Would take me right out of the story!
Ah, the sex pollen book! I wondered whether a review of this might show up at some point. @Katty, it is definitely not how an aphrodisiac works, but it is how sex pollen works.
For those who do not frequent the less salubrious side of AO3, sex pollen is a very old fanfic trope, where a character is exposed to a substance or potion (“sex pollen”) which makes them incredibly horny for whoever happens to be nearby (and sometimes they will die if they don’t have sex right that minute). It’s usually marked dubcon (dubious consent) on fanfiction sites as a form of content warning, so I’m not surprised it made you feel uncomfortable to read. I am quite surprised to see it’s made it out of fanfic into mainstream HR.
That excerpt is seriously creepy… and more in line with the cover than I’d have guessed, given the frequency with which historical covers in particular seem to have little to do with each other. Who was it who pointed out that the cover didn’t look very consensual when this book first appeared on the site? You were prophetic.
The psychological reasons for why someone might consent to sex with someone after previously having a not-extremely-consensual encounter are probably both complex and highly variable, but at least for me, they’ve never included actually wanting to. My experience is obviously not universal! but has definitely been that any technically consensual sex I might have had with that person afterwards needs to come with a very large asterisk.
(As an aside, I wish we had a word for “technically consensual but nevertheless still traumatic and damaging because the person really did not want to.” “Coercive” isn’t bad for cases where undue pressure has been put on the person to say “yes,” but it doesn’t cover everything.)
This book worked for me as far as the sex pollen trope, but I didn’t like Kingston so the romance didn’t really work for me. I was solidly in the middle on it.
@Star: I think ‘dubious consent’would work. I’m sorry you experienced that.
Tragically, this is right on he money for the last three Jordan historicals I’ve tried. Yikes yikes yikes at the noncon/dubcon drugged sex here.
Sophie Jordan was on Fated Mates a couple months back and mention Johanna Lindsey’s Secret Fire (in which a Russian prince’s serfs give a woman an aphrodisiac so that she’d be into the prince) as inspiration for this book… so I guess the old skool-ness is consistent, too. definitely a big YIKES
@cindy, Johanna Lindsey’s Secret Fire was the first thing I thought of when I read the review! I HATED that book with a passion, largely due to the noncon drugged sex. Which happened more than once, appallingly. I’m really surprised anyone would see that as inspiration for plot.
This one also didn’t work for me, partly for that (though I never bought that the “love potion” was real), but also because by the latter half of the book the characters seemed to be moving around the story chessboard because The Plot Told Them To, rather than for organic character-based reasons.
I think “sex pollen” can be a reasonably legitimate trope, because trope != something the reader actually wants to experience IRL, and because idfic and kink should be allowed in fiction if not necessarily reality. Of course aphrodisiacs don’t work that way, because no incontrovertible aphrodisiac (or even “usually works” aphrodisiac) has been discovered, and lust/love potions are similarly fanciful. A lust potion (or potion with a lust side-effect) is so clearly a plot device that it seems far less offensive to me than an OG “pirate hero keeps raping the heroine until she changes her mind” novel, even though both are arguably versions of “fantasy of being swept away” that appeal to some readers.
Given it’s fanciful, I don’t see the harm in it as fiction. It should feel a lot closer to “I can’t stand you why can’t I stop thinking about your hair!” than “kinda-sorta rape”, though.
Any number of romances have “sex under false pretences” or “stuck in a cave/log-cabin/one-bedroom hotel room”. and it shouldn’t necessarily be flatly condemned, mainly because it’s usually a tropelicious way of getting two people together for Plot reasons. “Stuck in a cave &c” is just a version of the “compromised in a rainstorm so we have to marry/bone” Regency romance plot-line, and it is likewise constraining sexual choice by circumstances. ” Sex or love under false pretences goes back a long way in the romantic novel, and even before that to works like Cyrano de Bergerac, which is largely about things like “is physical attraction more or less important than emotional and mental attraction?”
That said, if it felt squicky to you I absolutely understand that you don’t want to read it, and you want to warn for dubcon, but I’m not quite persuaded that people should have their fantasies policed, mainly because the kinks a person ends up with are not the result of conscious choice!
Now I think about it, I think that the author may have been aiming for “sex pollen” and hitting something that sounds more like “blackout drunk”, in which case it’s extremely understandable that it felt off to you.