Lord Julian Batchelor Marquess of Ormond is the golden boy of the ton, but he has dark secrets no one know about. He decides to never marry.

Tessa Siren now Lady Tessa Calthorp since her brother is now the Duke of Acaster. Tessa decided she was going to live her life the way she wants it.
Julian finds out that the odds on his horse for the race is not to his liken. He meets with Tessa, and he tells her his horse is going to win the race. They decided on a bet 20K, his offer one night with him.

As Julian and Tessa spend time together, they learn about each other. One-night changes their life's forever, will they come to the right decision?

Sweet love story unfolds between Tessa and Julian, bring the tissues.
This was received as an ARC in exchanged for an honest review

This was a fairly smooth sailing story that had a lot of potential rough spots, but all seemed to be dealt with in a mature manner and smoothed out very quickly. Nice and entertaining read, looking forward to the next one.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

II'll start my review by stating that the first 2 books in the series are in my opinion two of Ms. Darlings best works. "Odds on the Rake" being one of the best 2023 historical romance releases period, which is why it saddens me to give "Wager with a Siren" anything less than 5 stars.

This is a solid 3.5 read in my opinion. The prose is fantastic like always, the characters wonderfully complex but somehow the two main leads romance was just okay. The instant attraction and borderline unwanted obsession they each felt towards so early on felt like it happened too quickly. I feel like the romance would have greatly benefited from longer slow burn, especially between two very serious minded characters.

A lovely read overall. Don't know how many books are planned for this series, but I hope a book or a novella for Liam Cassidy is in the pipeline.