I also felt that Cole went a bit overboard with all the hardship she endured.

Yes, or at least the fact that she endured so much but still remained physically safe. And the one really ugly incident from her past — the one the caused her scar — was underplayed, IMO. But I totally agree with you that it’s Cole’s heroines who make her books. Watching them deal with these stereotypically uber-alpha guys is what keeps me hooked on her books. It’s what, in fact, elevates her work from a lot of other books in which the stereotypical alpha hero is paired with a stereotypical heroine. There is always *some* freshness on at least one side in Cole’s books, IMO.

I’ve never found a revenge plot handled well in romance and here I simply could not respect Ethan. What kind of man would plan to wreck vengeance on the innocent child of his ‘tormentors’, a child he did not even know existed at the time? That totally ruined his character for me –that and the fact that he actually brought it on himself with all his sleeping around with married women and getting drunk.

Great point about Ethan causing his own problems with his amoral behavior. I actually like a good revenge plot, but agree with the excessive cruelty here. And he did know *about* Maddie when he took his revenge, although he didn’t know her (her father chides her mother for bringing Ethan into the house when Maddie was asleep. The scenes I had the hardest time with were those where Ethan tries to take his aggression out sexually; they felt too violating to me as a reader. And as much as I rolled my eyes a little at the way Cole brings the romantic relationship finally into full resolution, I think she needed to stage something pretty dramatic for me to look past a lot of Ethan’s self-serving anger and see the logic in the HEA. Ethan is not the easiest character to portray groveling, that’s for sure!

But I also felt that Cole went a bit overboard with all the hardship she endured. I mean, Ethan’s scar amounted to almost nothing next to her sufferings and he almost seemed to whine about it like a brat compared to Maddy’s attitude. The ‘fear of the curse’ was not as in evidence as it had been in the other two books and he didn’t angst much over the death of his fiancée–whom he hardly knew anyway–so most of his baggage was just the scar and the ‘evil’ Van Rowens.

And if Maddy was the best thing in the book for me, Ethan was the worst. I’ve never found a revenge plot handled well in romance and here I simply could not respect Ethan. What kind of man would plan to wreck vengeance on the innocent child of his ‘tormentors’, a child he did not even know existed at the time? That totally ruined his character for me –that and the fact that he actually brought it on himself with all his sleeping around with married women and getting drunk. I could accept that he would entertain some *thoughts* of vengeance toward Maddy at first, because he was so bitter, but it went on for far too long. And although we’re told that the revenge stuff was just a pretext to get close to Maddy I simply could not buy it.