Brothers in Arms - The Courage to Love

The Courage to Love - Samantha Kane The Courage to Love is a M/M/F erotic romance ostensibly set in the Regency era. Jason Randall, an earl of some sort, and Anthony Richards are veterans of the Napoleonic wars and formed an especially close friendship while serving together. With the war over, they return to London to propose marriage to Katherine Collier, a widow of a comrade of theirs. Kate, however, was forced to become a mistress after her husband's death, with traumatic results, and refuses to give up her hard earned independence easily.The book has so many flaws, I wonder whether I read the same book as those who gave it five stars.The most glaring flaw is a lack of sexual tension. Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but erotic romance should not merely be a romance with crudely worded, frequent sex scenes. It should be a romance where the sex plays an integral part in the conflict that drives the plot. I still want to see tension built up. A book where 80% of the action is sex builds no tension and leaves nothing to the imagination. Every itch was immediately scratched.For a book with as much sex as this one has, it was incredibly unerotic. The language was appalling. It wasn't the obscenity that got me, it was the absurd purple prose. If I never see "rampant erection," "nether lips" or see vaginal lubrication referred to as "cream" again, it would be too soon. Newsflash erotic fiction authors: if a woman's vaginal moisture is opaque and whitish enough to be compared to dairy products, it means the poor girl has some sort of infection. Yeast infections are not sexy.For a regency the language and attitudes were absurdly modern. Kate and her 16 year old niece Veronica have an absurdly modern relationship where Veronica is privy to, and accepting of, her aunt's sexual hijinks. The dialog sounds like something you'd hear on the streets of today and she makes a mess of the English title system. It is very much a wallpaper historical.In the end, I finished the book only as a compulsion. The increasingly boring sex scenes got skimmed and I failed to make any emotional connection to the players. I was as invested in the characters' feeling as I would be in a porn star's, which is to say, not at all.