Rules of an Engagement, Suzanne Enoch

Product Description from Amazon.com

For proper young ladies, good behavior has always been the rule… 

Captain Bradshaw Carroway loves the seafaring life—though he’d rather be battling brigands than his current assignment of ferrying a boatload of spoiled aristocrats. One passenger, however, has caught his eye: a bewitching young minx who definitely distracts him from the rules of shipboard decorum …

Some rules, of course, are meant to be broken. 

Miss Zephyr Ponsley has traveled the world, but she’s completely innocent in the ways of love. She’s never learned to dance or flirt. But scientific observation has taught her that the laws of attraction have no rules, and that no adventure, on land or sea, is more dangerous—or delicious—than passion!

So I really like this book. As soon as I read it I sent a message to Wellofcromulence [RC’s altar ego] telling her that I wanted to review it. But I had to re-read it first!

So Captain Bradshaw Carroway is the brother of two of Enoch’s earlier hero’s but those stories aren’t vital to this one. This book is also a part of her Adventurers Club series.

Anyways, onto the story …  Captain Carroway is a captain in the British Navy. Yes, imagine the uniform, I’ll wait… yep. He is a strong man with a soft side, but his soft side actually comes with a back story. He gets sent to the Pacific with his big ship (hehe) [hurr hurr] and has to play captain of a passenger ship for a bunch of spoiled aristocrats and Zephyr [what a name!] and her father, a renowned scientist who wants to explore the botany of the Pacific. Zephyr has been following her father around, acting as his assistant and basically has no social skills. When they first meet, she says something snarky and catches the Captains attention. Skip forward and everyone is on the boat, going to the islands and exploring. The Captain is always worried about Zephyr and she is experiencing new “feelings”. They flirt, he tells her that she can’t do anything to endanger herself, she gets angry for his high handedness, etc. The flirting scenes were well written and not too fast or too slow. The sexy sex is toward the end of the book and it is pretty typical of a romance novel. There is plenty of action and of course they fight the eviiiiiil French.

I really like Enoch’s writing and how she went into different themes that were present during the time period. I feel like she did a bunch of research on boats and the European explorers.

In conclusion. Read this. There is good dialogue, lust, love, action, adventure, science, sex. This will be a book that I keep in my re-read pile.