Just okay really. Their was a whole lotta rolling around in their heads, too many sex scenes. Hardly anything really happened. ( )

Originally published on Tales to Tide You Over

I’ve been reading Harlequin romance novels since I was a young teen, and in that time, I’ve built up some expectations and preferences between the various lines. While Romance is my favorite because it focuses the most on the people, which is why I read romance amidst my science fiction ideas and fantasy cultures, I have always had a soft spot for the Presents line. This was where Harlequin would place novels about faraway places with rolling deserts of sand and nomadic cultures. Well, though never focused on the places I’d called home, I read many sheik novels to recapture that familiar environment. Okay, so I wasn’t the typical audience, but still, I missed the desert, and with its flowing descriptions, and focus on the exotic, Presents could bring me back to that place.

Imagine my surprise then when I read Heir to a Dark Inheritance, a novel set in the Middle East and containing palaces even, to find the characters holding my attention more than my own memories. Heir to a Dark Inheritance takes an interesting spin on the secret baby theme by having the baby’s mother out of the picture. This is critical because Alik wants to do the right thing by his progeny even though he had no intention of having a kid, and barely found out about his daughter before losing his parental rights in absentia. He didn’t start life as a wealthy man, as a leader. No, he was abandoned by his parents to a Russian orphanage. He’s determined the same will not happen to any of his blood even though all gentle feelings, almost all feelings of any type, have been worn away between his childhood and adult life as a mercenary.

And Jada is not your typical Presents character either. Rather than a wide-eyed innocent, though she has little experience with a billionaire’s lifestyle, she’s been married before. Her husband died young, before they could mature out of their differences and find a way to have a child together. From an Indian American family, Jada was raised on traditional values and expectations. She sees her short marriage as perfect love, never to be supplanted. Her only regret was her inability to conceive or to convince her husband to find another way to claim a child. Leena, adopted when born, answered both the wish for a child and the hole left by her husband’s death. She’s devoted the past year to her daughter, and will do almost anything to keep that connection.

The characters are full and rich with possibility. Both are broken by their lives and yet at the same time highly functional, enough so that it’s hard for them to see the damage done, at least in Jada’s case, and hard to believe it can be healed in Alik’s.

This is a short book, so fast paced, but the transformation, the ways Jada and Leena worm under Alik’s armor while Alik challenges Jada’s beliefs, is very clear. My only quibble is how her former marriage has to lose its shine for her to be open to new possibilities for happiness. That said, it was inevitable because she had put that marriage, and her first husband, on a precarious pedestal as people often do with the dead rather than seeing his weaknesses but also the strengths that brought the two of them together.

Regardless, the characters captivated me, and the interactions with Leena were both strong and poignant. Yates offers something special with this title. ( )