“He had a relationship of sorts with the stars. They might be cool and distant, but they were good listeners.” – 3/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: ships, secrets, spies, missions, rogues and crushes.

Lady Daphne Swift comes from a family with two brothers who have proudly served the Crown. She may be a female, but she’s willing to do whatever it takes to prove that she’s as useful to the war effort as her brothers. She even went so far as to secretly marry a spy. The fact that she just happened to have been pining for Captain Rafe Cavendish for years didn’t hurt matters. But after their first mission, when she realized their marriage had been strictly business, Daphne immediately wanted an annulment. The fiery Daphne has always been a multi-tasker and now she’s hell bent on two things: finding the men who killed her brother and securing her engagement to another man to forget about Rafe forever.

As a spy for the War Office, Captain Rafferty Cavendish has been on dozens of missions. But one mission haunts him, the mission that resulted in the death of Daphne Swift’s eldest brother, Donald. Rafe agreed to work with Daphne once and put her life in danger. Now he must find the men who killed Donald, avenge the family, and convince Daphne to give him one more chance. But Daphne’s enlisted her other older brother, Julian, to help her get a quick and quiet annulment so that she can marry a fop who only wants her for her title and money. Can Rafe convince Daphne to give him one more chance, on the mission and with her heart?

I was hoping this would be a bop just like the previous book but this was just… okay? Looking back, I had two main issues with this book:

1. It’s incredibly unrealistic – and yes, I know it’s fiction… but c’mon, this was on another level of unrealistic. The spy plot-line was silly at times;
2. Where is the romance? I could be fine with the silly plot-line, but the story lacked romance and that’s the main reason why I picked up this series in the first place. I just wish the focus of the book wasn’t the secret spy mission. There were so many scenes with potential to develop the romance!

The characters were okay, though a little on the annoying side. It was good to see some of the older characters from the series back, though!

If you decide to pick up this series from Valerie Bowman because you like historical books, keep in mind that there are a lot of historical inconsistencies in this book. Personally this doesn’t bother me, but I can definitely see this being a deal-breaker to some readers.

Needless to say I wasn’t super impressed with this book. Not the best book of the series nor the worst.