READING: The Governess Game (Girl Meets Duke #2) by Tessa Dare

Publication date: August 28 2018
Published by: Avon
Genre: Adult, Historical Romance, Regency, Chick-Lit 
Rating:

After her livelihood slips through her fingers, Alexandra Mountbatten takes on an impossible post: transforming a pair of wild orphans into proper young ladies. However, the girls don’t need discipline. They need a loving home. Try telling that to their guardian, Chase Reynaud: duke’s heir in the streets and devil in the sheets. The ladies of London have tried—and failed—to make him settle down. Somehow, Alexandra must reach his heart... without risking her own.

Like any self-respecting libertine, Chase lives by one rule: no attachments. When a stubborn little governess tries to reform him, he decides to give her an education—in pleasure. That should prove he can’t be tamed. But Alexandra is more than he bargained for: clever, perceptive, passionate. She refuses to see him as a lost cause. Soon the walls around Chase’s heart are crumbling... and he’s in danger of falling, hard.

I don't know what went wrong with this one, because I absolutely love Tessa Dare.
But The Governess Game was sloppy and quiet honestly, not memorable.

First off, the romance started right away so there was no angsty suspense or any sexual tension/anticipation at all. That didn't feel right to me, because when I'm reading an HR book I expect to be seduced, and this one didn't deliver.
Very quickly Chase wanted Alex, and Alex was thinking about marrying Chase and having his babies from the moment she met him, so that was a huge red flag right from the get go.
I was willing to look past it though because it's Tessa Dare and she is a romance master.
I'm afraid it didn't get much better after that :/

I think my main problem with the book is that I didn't see any chemistry between Chase and Alex. I didn't buy into their attraction and consequently, love. Everything happened way too fast for me to fully understand either of their characters and, so I didn't really get why they were together.
I personally find it very hard to dislike a male character in HR, but Chase was pretty unlikeable. There were times when he was being deliberately mean to Alex and I was angry at him and her for just taking it, despite her self-proclaimed independence. His reason for not wanting to be there and raise the wards that were left in his care was pretty stupid, and it painted him as a complete coward.
As far as Alex goes, I felt that she was blindly in love with Chase and she would do anything for him, whereas he was just infatuated with the next pretty little innocent thing that cam
e his way. I know a lot of HRs have that premise of the rake unabashedly lusting after the cute girl, but a lot of them (the good ones) have provided a fully explained change of character in order for the reader to believe and accept the inevitable HEA in the end, something that The Governess Game never did.

Chase and Alex agreed to engage into some sort of teacher/student relationship in regards to sex, but that was never shown! Instead, we get a sense of time passing by other things occurring, and we think that all the while Alex and Chase are having these lessons somewhere. And they must have been, because Alex was very masterful in the last sex scene of the book, so I guess the lessons must have worked?! We were just never shown them, which was a major let down for me.

The only redeeming quality of this book were the parts with Daisy and Rosamund (the children), who provided a nice respite from the failure that was Chase, and of course Tessa Dare's unparalleled humour, for which I was really thankful.

3 stars on the Tessa Dare scale = pretty bad.