Kungfu adventure! White barbarian romance in ancient China! Princess running from marriage, and powerful, scary cool warlord chasing after! Princess who fights, and cares about family and honor and isn't too stupid or whiny or some other tragic character quirk that Asian female heroines are always afflicted with! 
 There are all sorts of things that are right about this book, at least concept-wise, that I cracked open this book with a lot of goodwill left over to forgive the unmistakeable romance book trappings. And those trappings are...well...if you are into romances, this book will be a joy. Myself, I found myself wishing this was told as a straight historical fiction, or a straight fantasy, or a straight anything with a side of romance, rather than a romance with a side of history. 
 The main hero is a lusty fellow who "stirs" at the very sight of her walking, nevermind that she is pretending to be a guy. Even if she failed utterly in male drag, she still shouldn't have been that sexy, y/n? As the romance between the two characters deepened, passages became repetitive with the repeated iterations of how they love/fulfill/deserve-dont deserve each other. The main heroine constantly trumpeted "honor" so many times in her internal deliberations that the word lost any effectiveness or real meaning. 
 If the author weren't restricted by the Harlequin format, and allowed to double her page count, I imagine she could have built up the story with more of each character's history. Ryam's western world was left barely mentioned, though I could fill in the sketchy blanks well enough to get through the story. I would have liked to learn more about how the emperor became the emperor (I mean the real ins and outs, not just a 5 second summary), maybe have more time for them to fall in love (rather than just TWO DAYS of misadventure before they started declaring it), and explore the princess' brothers, who seem like a fun bunch. Building up Ai Li's family would give more strength to her arguments for and against defying them for the sake of barbarian love. 
 Finally, building up the villain would have been a huge bonus. The only time we find out that Li Tao wasn't being a bastard for the sake of being a bastard was in one, single, sentence. Thrown out there in a flash of insight on Ryam's part, then it was all over. Additionally, all accusations against the villain was on hearsay. He was a phantom menace, supposedly spurring the heroine on, but never really seeming like a great danger until his final physical appearance at the end. He is a powerful figure, and the story would have been better served to have him show up much earlier than he did. 
 All in all, though the story ended up being slighter than hoped for, the author's writing style is decent and non-intrusive, and the potential is there. I would recommend keeping an eye out for her future works, especially to see where else she goes in historal Chinese fiction.