It Takes a Rake by Anna Bennett

It Takes a Rake

By Anna Bennett

St. Martin’s Paperbacks 2024

The beating heart of It Takes a Rake, the third book in Anna Bennett’s “Rogues to Lovers” series (after One Duke Down and the delightful Girls Before Earls), is the long-term conflicted relationship between the book’s two main characters, Kitty Beckett and Leo Lockland. In their youths in Bellehaven, they’d both been students of architecture. Then Leo moved to London to pursue his architectural studies, but the bowstring tension of the relationship only increased with time. “He and Kitty’s relationship had always been based on an odd combination of fierce competition and grudging respect,” he reflects. “But beneath the barbs and the banter – on his side, at least – was a constant longing.”

As Bennett’s  novel opens, four years have passed, and Leo has returned to Bellehaven just in time for the booming town’s architectural tournament, in which aspirants submit plans for one of the town’s new buildings. Leo will of course be joining the fray, and so will Kitty, who’s bristling with resentment that her old friend ever left Bellehaven in the first place. At their testy reunion, she taunts him by mentioning all the new eligible ladies in town who might be potential victims of his seduction.

A kind of bargain emerges, driven by mistaken motives and imaginary lechery. In exchange for Leo’s help with her own submission to the architectural contest, Kitty offers to help him refine his seduction skills, little guessing that she’s the only woman in the world he wants to seduce. As the competition heats up and Bennett steadily, confidently complicates her story (a louche lordling, a London architect named Victor, etc.), a fine example of the age-old Regency romance mistaken-enemies plot coheres. 

Bennett makes delightfully buoyant reading out of it all, particularly when both Leo and Kitty begin to realize the reality of their situation and her seduction lessons take on an ironic double edge. “A smile lit her face and she traced his bottom lip with her finger, tempting him sorely,” one such passage goes. “ ‘I never dreamt my rake lessons would result in such a transformation,’ she teased. ‘I fear I have created a monster.’” 

In response to this comment, he nuzzles her neck and then  … and then proceeds immediately to the kind of thing readers would never, never find in their mother’s or grandmother’s Regencies. Bennett gives her characters all of the witty banter of those older Regencies, but she throws in plenty of  … anatomical demonstrations along the way. 

It Takes a Rake handles these two aspects of the modern Regency in a smoothly balanced small-town tale of long-delayed love. It’s another winning entry in this “Rogues to Lovers” series.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News