The Duke and I

The tone sours once Simon and Daphne marry, several readers say, and the charm of the courtship section doesn't survive into the final third. Simon's refusal to have children becomes a persistent irritant, curdling his likability for readers who found him charming earlier, and one flatly writes “Once they were married it became intolerable and irritating.” A married-life scene draws the sharpest fire: multiple readers call it a serious consent violation and object that the story treats it as a misunderstanding to talk through rather than a real wrong, with no lasting consequence before the genre's expected happy ending. One reader sums up the couple as “Simon & Daphne = Dumb & Dumber,” and another calls Daphne outright “the worst heroine that I've read in a long time.”