His Wicked Revenge

Hero: Anthony Barnett
Heroine: Lady Marissa Paget (née Joslin)

This is a short story, and a very quick read.  I did not like it, and here's why (spoilers lurk below):

• The hero is bent on revenge, but he's misdirected his anger at his fellow victim, the heroine.  Even when he discovers his idiocy, he still tries to punish the heroine.
• The heroine doesn't have moxie.  She's stuck between her vengeful hero and her villainous brother, and she acquiesces to the one who presents the most danger to her daughter's well-being, the hero.  This is ridiculous because the hero is her daughter's father.  (She knows this; he doesn't.)  A simple solution would have been to counter the hero's proposal (that she become his public mistress) with her own.  My idea?  She tells him to ruin her indebted brother, but provide for her and their daughter.
• A chance encounter, a bit too convenient for my tastes, reveals the hero's daughter to him, and he flips out.  Later he realizes his reaction was unwarranted, but it was too little, too late to redeem him in my eyes.  It didn't help things that the heroine considered telling him about his daughter the night before but decided to put it off for weak reasons.
• The villain never gets his comeuppance.

Things that should have bothered me, but didn't:
• I'm not a big fan of the couples-with-a-past scenario, but it worked here because the couple was separated by other people, not themselves.
• The length was super short.  Any longer and I probably would have abandoned it due to my dislike of the characters.

I'm not ready to write off Vanessa Kelly yet, but I'm also not super eager to purchase any of her other work (despite a recommendation from Teresa Medeiros).  I have too much on my TBR pile to give her a second chance at this time.

I don't like rating books by a star or number system, so here's my rating system:
Bad=Quit reading the book
Fair=It was okay; I finished it
Good=I liked it
Great=I loved it; definitely would enjoy re-reading it someday

Rating for His Wicked Revenge: Fair