Sparring Into Love: Spymaster's Lady

I swapped some romance suggestions with a friend (I suggested Jennifer Crusie), and picked up Joanne Bourne's The Spymaster's Lady on MM's recommendation.  The lady is a spy in her own right, one of the top agents of the French revolution, and holds her own deftly in the contests she has with or against the English spymaster.

I can really feel my age here though, because she is only nineteen and I kept thinking of her as a child (he's twenty six).  Shades of my mother telling me about the nice young boy she sat next to on the airplane trip, who suddenly turns out to be fifty something, not five.  But I was very uncomfortable during the first sex scene, because the issues of consent seemed very murky, especially with such a young girl.  But I got over it, and enjoyed the shift of balance between the two, as well as the often silly plot twists that Bourne skillfully kept me from giggling at.  I look forward to her next one, which I have conveniently already obtained from the library.

That's not my cover, by the way.  Mine has some guy taking off his shirt in a field, and I kept trying to figure out what scene it represents.  Not the bathtub scene, not the surgery scene, and it really doesn't work as the betrothal-in-a-park scene.  Maybe it's a teaser for a different book.  B+