Secret Seduction, by Susan Napier

Even though I'm not a huge fan of Harlequin Presents, the recent discussion at AAR had me wanting to read one. Of course, not being a fan, I don't have very many of them. There are a few by Susan Napier (my most glommed author last year), but that's about it, so a Napier it was, Secret Seduction.

Nina Dowling was happy on her island home, despite the missing two years of her life. Then a stranger arrives, bringing flashes of memory and pain. Ryan Flint has pushed his way into Nina's life, forcing her to remember what she can't bear to think about, from their life together to why she ran away.

Not the best Napier I've ever read, but it was a nice read. A B-.

The story's premise is almost identical to that of my fave book so far by this author: Another Time. The heroine, who's lost her memories of a certain period of time in her past, meets a man who claims to have had a relationship with her then. From then, each of the books goes in a different direction. Secret Seduction is a bit more angsty. I don't want to spoil anything here, but things get darker and darker as Nina begins to remember.

Nina and Ryan's initial meeting was wonderfully dramatic, but I thought Ryan's supposed amnesia (yep, there's amnesia right and left here) diluted the focus of the story quite a bit.

But the main problem I had with this book was the lack of Ryan's POV. Actually, we get into his head exactly once in the entire book, and it was for something like two paragraphs, which is even worse than if we'd never been there. Getting a few more scenes from his POV might have removed a bit of the mystery in the first part of the book (mystery which had been given away already by the back cover copy, I might add), but it might have made Ryan more real.

I was even more interested in his reactions than in Nina's. How does he feel to see the woman he loves again and realize that she doesn't remember him at all? How does it feel to have to hide he knows her? Apart from certain very powerful scenes (I loved, loved, loved the one on the first night he spends at Nina's, when he asks her to hold him. Sounds corny, but I loved it), Nina's POV just wasn't enough to makes me feel what he must have been feeling, and he tends to seem just like the average "sardonic" HP hero.

Still, I liked Secret Seduction very much and will definitely continue to read Napier.