This left me laughing and scowling in a way, but definitely very moved and it had patches of such brilliance, that it was the best I read last week.

I loved the description on the battlefield, in fact I loved both characters, each very much himself and special, and both very different from each other, but then also sharing traits. Very well drawn and continuously throughout the story added upon. I also loved the secondary characters like Cohen or the uncle, or Gilley.

There were niggles though:

Foremostly the modern kind of sex these two had. For a reticent, repressed guy like Reese he switched to full-blown porntastic 21st century sex a tad too fast to being believable. In fact, this story was set up to support a slow coming into sex between the two, and I'd have preferred that, and also if it hadn't been so formulaic. In that era only 10-20% of all gay men actually had anal sex, so I'd like to see that represented occasionally, especially with a book else so intent on getting the era right. There was too much sex, and unlike Erastes I found over 50% of it to be quite free of any true foundation in the plot. The two men were at it like bunnies. However, this just may be my general irritated response to the overdose of sex in so many m/m novels.

The end was a bit too rushed, and I'd have needed a bit more on the villain to find him truly believable. I also would have liked to know more about Reese the spy, especially after the magnificent battle sequence. ( )

Bonnie Dee has an odd record, she is probably one of the last authors of heterosexual romance I read some years ago and one of the first authors of gay romance I read more or less soon after that. I still remember when I was perusing Loose Id backlist for their gay romance titles (at the time very few) and I found some novels by Bonnie Dee, one of them, a fantasy, was one of the best read in a long time. The strange coincidence is that, the collaboration with Summer Devon was still far in the future, but I also knew Summer Devon, with her other pen-name, and I had even interviewed her for my now closed romance blog: with the pen-name she uses to write heterosexual historical romances, Summer Devon was among the few authors to be translated into Italian, and she was so nice to give me an interview when one of her romances was released in Italy (and if you consider that the average of releases at the time was less than 5 per month you can understand she was really among few selected authors).

Long introduction to say that both Bonnie Dee than Summer Devon come from a long, and good, experience writing historical or fantasy romance and you can well understand that reading their today Gay Historical Romance. They are always well plotted, and well developed, with the right amount of sex to make it an “interesting” reading if you are a romantic reader, but never forgetting this is also a Gay Historical Romance, and so the heroes are not a replica in breeches of a the heroine; they can have some faults, they can like rough sex, but that doesn’t mean they are not fully men.

Like Jonathan, he has many disadvantages in comparison to Karl, Karl is noble, wealthy, with a big ego and an even bigger self-esteem, while instead I felt in Jonathan a need of a stronger hand, someone to lead him. Despite this, during their first encounter, I was almost expecting for Jonathan to take the lead, to be the dominant lover, after all he was there to protect Karl. While Jonathan was a middle class man used to work with his hands, Karl was a spoiled aristocrat. It’s a fine play of balance the one between Jonathan and Karl, but in the end, my assumption on Jonathan is correct, even if he doesn’t need protection, he is well capable of taking care of himself, he likes to have a dominant lover, in life and bed.

Karl and Jonathan likes sex, Karl maybe it’s more experienced than Jonathan, but both of them are willing to admit where their true interest lies and to take up when the chance comes. One of the point I probably liked more than everything is that, despite the fact Karl and Jonathan have a common past together which saw them fighting on opposite side of the field, they don’t let this influence their first encounter and the following relationship. That episode is something that is bonding them more than making them enemies forever.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1611183669/?tag=elimyrevandra-20