Anne Stuart makes me cringe.. and I mean that as a compliment

After enjoying Ruthless so immensely, I'm now reading number 2 in this trilogy, Reckless, the story of the son of the protagonists of Ruthless, Adrian Rohan. The heroine is called Charlotte Spenser. I'm not sure why it pleases me so very much that she's Spenser rather than Spencer, but there you are.

I'm about a quarter of the way in, enjoying it a great deal, and already a major Stuart trademark has asserted it - the Cringe.

I love high conflict novels where characters are really put through the mill. And boy, does Stuart deliver on this. There are many forms of suffering and one that Stuart does particularly well is subjecting the heroine to feelings of inadequacy. It's hard to read and it's relateable - who among us hasn't felt precisely this at some point in our lives? It delivers an emotional punch, creates empathy for the character. It makes us cringe. I experience the best cringes physically, a clench of sympathy, right in my gut.

Attractive as the cover for Reckless is, the heroine is actually a six foot redhead. She does not consider herself attractive. At thirty, she considers herself firmly on the shelf. At the start of the story, she decides to attend a three day orgy with her worldly cousin. She is going, in disguise, to satisfy her curiosity but with no intention of participating. However, on the very first night, she is discovered by Adrian and forced into a tryst with him.

At the start of the scene when Adrian first accosts her Charlotte believes he doesn't know who she is, or even that she is female (she is dressed in a monk's robe). She is horrified to have seen him, even more so to have fallen into his hands. She is desperate to get away - and for reasons that make you ache for her:

She could push back her cowl, shock him into releasing her. But she still held off, hoping there was some way to escape this terrible mess she'd gotten herself into without betraying her identity. And the dismal truth of it was that she wasn't so much afraid of the social aftermath as of him knowing she'd been there. She was afraid to see that light in his eyes flicker and fade with disappointment once he saw who he really had in his net.

As their battle continues, Adrian forces her to an uncomfortable admission in an attempt to make him release her:

"You would hardly lower your standards to .... to .... be an unwilling antidote, a plain old maid."

There's no reassurance from Adrian, merely this:

"The word is fuck... And you wouldn't be unwilling."

Charlotte has long been obsessed with Adrian, watching him from afar, hating her own stupidity and knowing him far out of her league. She is in a place of absolutely no power in this scene: poor, plain and in thrall to a man she feels sure will despise her, or at least be completely indifferent. She is desperate to remain anonymous.

So close, so tantalisingly close, and all she had to do was pull back her cowl and he'd release her, shocked, horrified, perhaps disgusted at the thought of the mistake he'd almost made...

... "You don't want to do this," she said desperately.

At which point he delivers a line that seems rather cold, but actually delivers to Charlotte a modicum of power and eases both her low sense of self-worth and the reader's fears:

"Of course I do. I've wanted to do for a long time, Miss Spenser."

Delicious.