Alice Gaines novel, THE SIXTH LOVER is an amazing story about how true love can come from a letter sent from many miles away.

Carole Rutherford is a woman in the 1880's living in New York who is happily married to her husband. Though she loves him, he cannot make her completely happy sexually. But she would never think of being unfaithful, as one of her friends had suggested she should have had five lovers before him. That way a woman could truly know by the sixth if she loves him or just settling.

Carole's husband is rich and can provide for her. Is that enough for her though?

Twenty years later Carole's sickly husband finally dies leaving her a widow at the age of forty. She has never had any children and is still beautiful in the eyes of other men. One who actually has sent her a letter from London claiming that he knew her years ago and has always been madly in love with her.

Mr. Thomas Rose will not give her clues of who he is but his letters speak of things that she has always been naive about. Her husband could only perform the basic for a woman's need of sex leaving her inexperienced with exotic burning lovemaking. Mr. Rose speaks of such love in his letters and challenges her to explore those parts of her that she has wondered secretly about on her own. She falls passionately in love with him through their letter writing.

He agrees to meet her but only after she completes the task that shows him how much she is really in love with him. She has to travel to London and have four more lovers before coming to him. As Carole thinks about how she had heard something similar before she agrees and her travels takes her to some incredible and some very different men that she would not have ever dreamed of being with.

When she finally meets Mr. Thomas Rose she finds out details about his past that he kept from her. Secrets that tell how they knew each other and how he fell in love with her twenty years ago. Will she be upset with him from his secrets? Can she still agree to love him when she finds out? Mainly how has the past men she has been with affect how she can make him happy if she decides to truly give him what he wants the most? Her love.

THE SIXTH LOVER is a book that will have you captured from the first page. I found myself in awe as I read about the depths that Carole went through to bring herself to the man she thinks she is in love with. THE SIXTH LOVER written by Alice Gaines will be a novel hard for another erotic story line to top.

THE SIXTH LOVE is a must to add to your summer reading list.