Free Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell Page B

a refreshing change from other romance heroes, because I think a lot of asshole heroes, especially those from the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s, are arrogant because they’re self-important twats.”
    He heard a rustle of movement and a muffled sound somewhere ahead and to his left. His gaze shifted thither. The female whose murmurs he’d heard was bent over a display case of jewelry. The shop was exceedingly ill lit—on purpose, to increase customers’ difficulty in properly evaluating what they were looking at. All Dain could ascertain was that the female wore a blue overgarment of some sort and one of the hideously overdecorated bonnets currently in fashion.
    “I particularly recommend,” he went on, his eyes upon the female, “that you resist the temptation to count if you are contemplating a gift for your
chère amie.
Women deal in a higher mathematical realm than men, especially when it comes to gifts.”
    “That…is a consequence of the feminine brain having reached a more advanced state of development,” said the female without looking up. “She recognizes that the selection of a gift requires the balancing of a profoundly complicated moral, psychological, aesthetic, and sentimental equation. I should not recommend that a mere male attempt to involve himself in the delicate process of balancing it, especially by the primitive method of counting.”
    For one unsettling moment, it seemed to Lord Dain that someone had just shoved his head into a privy. His heart began to pound, and his skin broke out in clammy gooseflesh…
    He told himself that his breakfast had not agreed with him. The butter must have been rancid.
    It was utterly unthinkable that the contemptuous feminine retort had overset him.
    —
LORD OF SCOUNDRELS
BY LORETTA CHASE, 1995
    DOMINIC (ALSO DOMINIC’S FATHER, THE DUKE OF AVON)
    Devil’s Cub
    By Georgette Heyer
    Dominic Alastair, called “Vidal” throughout most of
Devil’s Cub
, is, to put it frankly, a complete jerkwad. He takes advantage of women, he is rather insatiable in his appetites for things he shouldn’t be doing, and he thinks he is irresistible, which is why it is unabashed fun when he meets his match in Mary, the heroine.
    Ros says that she “loves the bad boys who turn (almost) good once they find the right woman: Dominic Alastair (
Devil’s Cub
) and Jasper Damerel (
Venetia
) are my absolute all-time favorites. Both of them are fun, clever, surprisingly caring, and utterly drop-dead gorgeous.”
    Broke Baroque agrees: “I tend to gravitate toward the Bad Boy end of the hero spectrum. I love me some rakes and libertines, the more dissipated and jaded the better, who are reformed by love. Well, not totally reformed, I guess—more like they fall in love and start to understand that there’s more to life than getting drunk all the time. I just like the fantasy of the playboy rake turning respectable for the love of a good woman.”
    Alex echoes Broke’s comments and says Dominic is one of her earliest ideal heroes: “I read
Devil’s Cub
at a clearly impressionable age and Dominic is, and always has been, at the top of my list. Entirely Alpha but I think Heyer puts it beautifully when Mary says, ‘I could manage him.’ I think that one simple line sums it up, really—we want to think that we can tame a bad boy.”
    FREDDY
    Cotillion
    By Georgette Heyer
    Heyer has crafted several heroes that readers adore, and Freddy is definitely one. Scribblerkat says that she adores Freddy because she loves “the Sidekicks and the Unlikely Heroes. But most of all I love the heroes whose primary characteristics are intelligence and a sense of humor. A prime example of the latter is Freddy from Georgette Heyer’s
Cotillion
.”
    Kitzie says that “there’s only one strictly romance hero that I like that would also be good in real life: Freddy from
Cotillion
. He would stand by you and make you laugh. That’s way more dreamy than a muscular torso.”

    And the top two