The Dragon Earl by Jade Lee

Evelyn Stanton is about to be married when her wedding day is interrupted by three strangers, all dressed as Chinese monks. Two of them actually *are* Chinese, but the other claims to be none other than Jacob Cato, the long-lost heir to Earldom of Warhaven, and her promised husband, since Evelyn is promised to the Earl of Warhaven.

She is surprised to see that he is white, but cannot but think that he is a charlatan come to her wedding for money. Pay him enough, she thinks, and he will move on, seeking some other rubes to con. But when she has paid him fifty pounds, she is suprised to find him giving that money, as well as much, much more than that, to the Bishop of the Church.

With her wedding to her former Fiancee seeming further and further away at every moment, both Evelyn and her Fiancee question Jacob to see if he might be telling the truth. To her shock and dismay, not only does he seem to be telling the truth, but she is finding herself attracted to him. It is another shock when she finds out that he doesn't want to be Earl, but he wants to become a monk, and that his abbot, a wise man who Jacob trusts, forced him to return to England to put that part of himself to rest before he could join the order with the other monks.

He protested, but finds that he still feels a great degree of anger towards the person who caused his parents to be killed, and perhaps some towards the servant who escaped the carnage but never said that Jacob was still alive allowing Jacob to wait for years in China to be rescued. He at last succumbed to his apparent fate and began training to be a monk, and now he wants nothing else but to return to China.

But time in England is slowly making him see that he is truly a man without a country, and is neither Chinese nor white, but a strange admixture of both- wanted nowhere and comfortable in neither place. The only thing he wants is Evelyn. But can he have her and his vengeance, too?

I found this book to be somewhat disjointed. It seemed to be more about the pasts of both of the characters than about their romance. For so much of the book, they are at cross-purposes: Evelyn only wants Jacob because she is physically attracted to him, and he only wants her because his abbot was adamant that Jacob take everything that was supposed to be his. It's a very slow process of them admitting they like and care about each other... at all, much less than for reasons other than why they came together in the first place.

Even her reason for staying together at the end were less than about love. Evelyn realizes that she will be freer staying with Jacob than with the man she was about to marry, Christopher. It is Jacob who has come to realize how much he loves her, and that he cannot bear to be parted from her. She, too, loves him, but I had to wonder how much of that love was grounded in her being more free to do as she pleased and wished than it was about actual affection. While the ending was sentimental and pleasing, I found something suspect about the Happily Ever After that we are presented with.

This was an okay book, and as such, I really wish I hadn't spent my money on it. It's not so good that I want to keep it, and I really would have been happier if I had rented it from the library. There's nothing in my mind, good or bad, that will make this book stand out from a rank of other romance novels, and perhaps that's the most telling condemnation I can make.