A young woman arrives from Boston, unescorted, in teeming San Francisco of 1870. She has reason to believe that her sister is in trouble. But Edith is soon to discover that trouble awaits anyone visiting the city. Surrounded by businessmen, Chinese, rogues, thieves and charlatans, she finds it difficult to get her bearings. A businessman called Dutch, who has a lively past, helps her at the station but he's more concerned with the activities of white slavers.

ONE MOMENT'S PLEASURE shows us a busy city with wheeler- dealers getting up to all kinds of mischief and inadequate or corrupt law. Edith takes a room in a house of ill repute hoping to find her sister, but is drugged and Dutch inadvertently places the winning bid for her at auction. Realising that she's a lady, he has no intention of taking it further, but removes her for own protection and demonstrates to her what peep-shows and bordellos are about, hoping to make her see sense. The stubborn girl can't give up her quest however....

Rue Allyn is swift to place contrasting characters in an interesting situation and the pace keeps up, with plenty of period detail to anchor the story. Opium dens, stray dogs, photography and child abuse all populate the streets, and Edith really does come across as an innocent abroad. Lucky for her she has friends in Dutch, kittens, a priest and a Chinese girl servant.

ONE MOMENT'S PLEASURE will interest romance readers with curiosity for historical tales and unusual settings.

Book Summary

One Moment's Pleasure will become a lifetime's passion when spinster, Edith Alden, embarks on a search for her missing sister. Pretending to be a rich bored woman looking for an interlude with an anonymous male Edith enters the San Francisco bordello where her sister was last seen. She escapes the bordello almost too easily, but she can't escape the passion ignited by a stranger's kiss.

Born and raised in the brothels of the California gold rush, Dutch Trahern worked for years to erase a childhood spent committing petty crimes and worse in order to survive. That past comes back to haunt him in the form of a woman he rescues from prostitution. Now his hard won respectability is threatened by an irresistible desire for a woman he shouldn't want.

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