I’m coming off a Diana Palmer bender of epic proportion, and maaaan am I hungover with vague blurry memories of thickets of chest-hair tenderly nestliI’m coming off a Diana Palmer bender of epic proportion, and maaaan am I hungover with vague blurry memories of thickets of chest-hair tenderly nestling little pink-and-mauve virgin breasts; smoky kisses, asshattery of epic proportions, MCs with the worst cases of Treacherous Body Syndrome ever seen, lots of biscuits and beef steers (not cows), soapboxing about everything from failing morals to hormones in beef, and… well, like I said, it’s all a bit fuzzy and overwhelming and I wonder where my panties are (just kidding :-D). Hell no, I won’t be reviewing most of them—this inebriating detour came in the midst of my trying to nail down 134 Betty Neels books, so damn you, Diana of the 100+ books, for leading me astray!
My appreciation of DP has grown in leaps and bounds. For an asshat collector like me, her heroes are a smorgasbord of whiplash emotions, outright emotional cruelty alternating with tender lovemaking (whiplash!), terrible unfounded misjudgments about our spunky-yet-vulnerable heroines (whiplash!), and an incredible vulnerability (whiplash!) that not many romance authors of her heyday would even attempt, let alone carry off. For all the hero POV she provides (a rarity in romance throughout much of her career, where enigmatic heroes were more the norm), her heroes are still so often SUCH incredible assholes even when you know what they’re thinking/feeling and how they are mostly being such jerks out of self-preservation. Even knowing their motives and emotions/thoughts doesn’t neuter the angsty goodness much, as our heroines are tossed hither and nigh in the hot-and-cold surf of our heroes’ emotions and desires. So much fodder for fans of alphahole heroes and angst, like me.
The stories themselves are ludicrous, repetitive, and hugely entertaining (whiplash!), full of high drama (car and plane crashes! Bad guys vs. white hats! Lawmen and mercenaries! Miscarriages! Leaky heart valves!) and misunderstanding. Donovan was low in the action-drama stakes (no spies-like-us stuff, no bad guys out to off the heroine, no failing hearts or one-shot pregnancies, even), but had a hefty share of emotional angst in a relatively straightforward story (view spoiler)[(rancher with a chip on his shoulder meets riches-to-rags heroine, marries her to win a custody battle, kicks her out of his life shortly after, and spends the rest of the book trying to win her back without quite relinquishing his asshat creds) (hide spoiler)]. Our hero is about middlin’ in the DP cruelty stakes (which, for any other author, would put him beyond the pale), but that’s just a relative measure against her worst heroes. Mostly he’s just dumber than dirt and prone to emotional whiplash (I want her! I want her gone!) because of a mild-in-DP-terms past experience. And yet, I still somehow buy into her HEAs! This book is probably a good intro to DP since you get a soupcon of cruelty and drama while working up to heroes/backstories like those in Lawman and Rodrigo, who really torture their oh-so-vulnerable and damaged (but spunky-sweet!) heroines.
I have to say, for all that DP is weirdly prudish in some ways and prone to exalting masses of chest hair and smoking as sexually alluring (ah, the 80s, with Marlboro Men and Tom Selleck/Sam (whew!) Elliot of the twinkling eyes), DP writes some serious heat somehow (even with her often impenetrable virgins, out-of-the-gate-minute-men heroes, and not-so-great first (but transcendent subsequent) sexual encounters). I don’t understand how exactly, but even without being truly explicit, she pulls off hot and very tender sex scenes even with her hairiest, cig-puffing-est, worst-offender asshat heroes. It’s a kind of magic that is entirely her own. I get the love now, I really do, from all the DP fans out there. I’ve actually become one myself, something I never envisioned when I first starting reading her earlier this year. Go figure!
For a real review of Donovan, instead of drunk-on-DP ramblings, see St Margaret’s review. For a dip-your-toe-before-plunging-in intro to the absurdities and wonders of DP’s catalog, Donovan’s not a bad place to start....more
There ain’t no alphahole like an ‘80s alphahole wielding ‘80s HP tropes. The title is dead on! This one had it all:
✓Dark and dangerous hero with a recThere ain’t no alphahole like an ‘80s alphahole wielding ‘80s HP tropes. The title is dead on! This one had it all:
✓Dark and dangerous hero with a reckless edge and the Best.Name.Ever: Revel Bradon. The heroine’s take-no-shit bestie describes him thusly: “wild and reckless…He’s all right for an affair, in fact I guess he’s devastating, but as a husband!...He’s a difficult swine, mean and moody—how can you hope to tame him?” Our Revel is a war correspondent (which neatly explains his darker side and his extreme cynicism) with a penchant for suicidal rides down Chapman’s Peak on his motorcycle and a hunger for the heroine that makes him despise himself and her. Ahhh, love a punishing, self-immolating, out-of-control alpha, what can I say?
✓Innocent, sheltered, misunderstood, misjudged heroine—a secretly ultra-sensitive (we are told time and again) photographer whose extreme reserve everyone misjudges as hauteur. Oh how she suffers! (So does the hero, so they’re equally a mess.) Despite the fact that the hero is an unrelenting asshole, our heroine is in instalove (and so is he). Vicarious masochism, anyone? Our heroine’s yo-yo feelings, stubbornness, and willingness to believe the OW’s lies (why?) are as much a factor in the MC’s fucked up relationship as is his cruelty—indeed, in her way, she’s just as cruel (though with cause and mainly out of self-preservation and a well-nurtured and merited bitterness towards the hero).
✓An OW from hell who is a childhood friend of the hero and completely obsessed with him. She’s the cause of most of the misconceptions and anger between them, in fact—and yet neither of them assumes she’s lying!
✓An OM (the OW’s husband) who is very like the heroine—withdrawn and reserved and from the same arid Karoo region of South Africa—a background they bond over. He is also quietly in love with our heroine but never makes a move and she makes it clear that she considers him only a friend. That doesn’t stop the hero from thinking our heroine is a home-wrecking Whore of Babylon deserving of punishment.
✓Love as a destructive force. I love this trope—high drama, mega angst! Bring it on!
✓Punitive sex! This is not the same as forced seduction, mind you. The hero wants the heroine, hates himself for it, and is determined to have her. And so he does, and after a first time that our virginal heroine doesn't enjoy at all and our slam-bam hero is furious about because he had no clue she was still petting unicorns, they are equally besotted but suffer the agonies of the damned as a result. There’s not a tender moment until the very end. “Love lies bleeding” indeed.
✓One-shot pregnancy (in an era when AIDS was devastating Africa more than any region in the world, would a cynical hard-edged journalist set on seduction really not suit up?).
✓A very bitter MoC-with-benefits that tears our MCs apart even more.
✓Sexual humiliation via delayed gratification. This is a cause of great agony for our heroine—sex without love is bad enough; being forced to beg for it is intolerable.
✓Events (view spoiler)[including a miscarriage that the hero thinks was deliberate because the OW told him it was--what a judgmental asshole! (hide spoiler)] that make an unrelentingly dark book even more full of anguish and bitterness.
✓A very late reconciliation and an HEA that comes about mainly through the OM's intervention but that I actually wanted to believe in because they both suffered so much. It's like a Robyn Donald ending--they've already done their worst, so MAYBE we can hope for better times ahead. Maybe.
Intense and riveting in the way that only certain vintage HPs could be. Set angst levels at "kill!" The OTT emotional wreckage of this story is awesome and memorable. I’m going a full five stars for this one, because Bauling was willing to subject her MCs to torture in getting to an HEA and the resulting angst and melodrama were epic. Ahhhh, the '80s....more
The Snow Bride, aka The Bluest Balls. The story is just okay, but dontcha love that Will Davies cover?
This hero suffers epic amounts of sexual frustraThe Snow Bride, aka The Bluest Balls. The story is just okay, but dontcha love that Will Davies cover?
This hero suffers epic amounts of sexual frustration in this one! Well, that’s what you get, 30-something hero, for coercing an 18-year-old girl into an MoC for nefarious reasons ((view spoiler)[to punish his double-dealing in-laws, particularly his brother-in-law who slept with his now-dead wife (hide spoiler)]). Our teenage (18-going-on-19 if I recall correctly) heroine agrees reluctantly when her mother pimps her out in marriage in exchange for a loan to tide over the family business while Daddy recovers from a stroke. Ah yes, a classic.
The ridiculous “contract” calls for our nubile heroine to be step-mother to a young girl in a platonic MoC for five years (5!), until Plot Moppet is old enough to be shunted off to boarding school. Ummm, okay. The hero isn’t rapey at least, but it’s clear on the travelogue honeymoon to Egypt that the hero would love to change the terms of the contract to include some boudoir bouncing with his nubile bride. The heroine is having none of it, though!
The heroine is a weepy little thing, and very attracted to/falling in love with our enigmatic hero, who starts off as such an late-70s/early 80s alpha but is actually pretty beta at heart, particularly for the last few chapters. He and the heroine start to draw closer after months of an unsatisfying MoC (with our youthful heroine deliberately freezing him out), and after a romantic date at which they both drink a little too much, they finally consummate their marriage (after almost a year of their MoC).
Bad sex! I love bad sex in romance novels, I don’t know why exactly except that it’s such a change from the raptures of heaven we usually get. The heroine is brought sharply down to earth when her first experience of sex HURTS and it doesn’t help that the hero gets overexcited and doesn’t last more than a minute (although given how little she was enjoying it at that point, maybe not such a bad thing). “These things happen sometimes,” he tells her, but she’s a total brat about it, hee, refuses his offer to remedy matters to her satisfaction, and sends him off shamed and angry.
Any closeness is gone after that, and it’s clear even to the plot moppet that things have gone sadly awry. The heroine is also troubled by the fact that she and the plot moppet have grown very close and the plan is for the heroine to skedaddle after the 5 years are up, and what will that do to little Emma? And she’s also troubled by the hero’s refusal to let his daughter have anything to do with his former in-laws (somewhat for good reason, but he’s implacable about it and the heroine thinks he could handle matters in a gentler way—although she doesn’t find out how nefarious the in-laws are until the end). And even MORE troubled when she begins to suspect that one of our wham-bam hero's little swimmers may have hit the mark.
Weird family dynamics, past traumas and drama, and an embittered hero who is abruptly shocked out of his schemes when the heroine finally lets him have it and gets him to see the wrongness of his ways (and it’s one of the few moments when she stopped being annoying, by the way—but she IS a teenager (19 at this point), so we’ll cut her some slack). Hero and heroine finally declare their mutual love, yadda yadda, the sex is great this time, and we have HEAs that wrap our MCs and plot moppet in squashy vintage love 4Evermore.
Well! This one was tropey and soapy and very vintage feeling in terms of May-December MCs, with an autocratic alpha and a very young heroine who is nonetheless supposed to come off as wise for her age (but doesn’t really). I can’t say I loved this—I skimmed a lot and both MCs annoyed me most of the time—but Hilton, whom I don’t think I’ve read before, has some nice descriptive but not too flowery scenes, and she had multiple points of conflict to keep the MCs apart until the end, so I can’t say I was bored. Very vintage in plot, tone, and characters and amusing in parts, but a lukewarm 3 stars at best. ...more
Alas, my honeymoon with Sara Craven is over. After three good ones, this book (pfffttt), featuring a mousey (but incredibly sexy, once she gets a WhatAlas, my honeymoon with Sara Craven is over. After three good ones, this book (pfffttt), featuring a mousey (but incredibly sexy, once she gets a What Not to Wear style makeover) poor relation in love with her cousin’s macho Brazilian fiancé, started off promising but then completely failed to deliver, mainly because of the idiotic, childish, selfish heroine. We’ve seen this setup plenty of times—Violet Winspear goes full OTT wrecki-drama in Child of Judas by having the poor-relation cousin pull a bold and insane substitute-bride switcharoo at the altar (with punishing results); Betty Neels has the mousey sister deliver the jilting letter and suggest an MoC (with lovelorn results) in the The Hasty Marriage; The Devil’s Bride by Margaret Pargeter has jilted and blind JERK fiancé force the imposter cousin into an MoC with benefits (with punishing results again)… just to name a few. We are on well-trodden terrain here but it usually delivers, so I was off to a happy start. This is one of my favorite tropes--so how did SC screw it up so badly?
In this case, the heroine completely ruined it for me. Most of SC’s heroines, in the books I’ve read, seem to have nitwit tendencies but Abigail is not just a total nitwit , she’s completely self centered and obsessed with the supposed hurt the hero inflicts--because she thinks he doesn't wuv her. The thing is, he is clearly besotted from almost the beginning and despite some alphahole tendencies and vintage behavior, is actually a nice guy most of the time, when he’s not being jealous because of her “friendship” with the douchey American manager of the neighboring Brazilian cocoa farm or being driven crazy by her hot-and-cold behavior towards him. I felt bad for Vasco (although SC shows him in a bad light when he insists on sex, perfunctory and unsatisfying, with his wife a few times, so there’s that). He would have been better off with the heroine’s horrible cousin—who was still a better bet than Abigail ended up being. He even would have been better off with his neighbor, who was known as The Black Widow. And the Big Misunderstanding at the center of their conflict was stupid--literally, one completed sentence on either side would have cleared things up. Weak.
Not only is the heroine a complete brat who focuses incessantly on her supposed woes (mainly that the hero doesn’t love her as she “loves” him), she also keeps vital information from him (about a plant fungus that is potentially devastating to his crops and does indeed wreak near-ruin on his property. She's vapid, stupid, horrid, insipid, and probably a whole bunch of other negative words ending in "id" that I can't think of (oh, and completely id-driven, so that works). She ruined the book for me, despite a hot Latin hero, some interesting information about Brazilian cocoa farms and the many dangers that face them, an exotic locale, and some decent occasional heat. After a handful of SC books that I enjoyed, this one was a dud....more
A decent sister truly is rarer than hen’s teeth in Harleyland. This 1985 outing from Penny Jordan has our heroine thrown to the wolf, our hero, to savA decent sister truly is rarer than hen’s teeth in Harleyland. This 1985 outing from Penny Jordan has our heroine thrown to the wolf, our hero, to save her horrible sister’s bacon. When will Harley heroines learn to just let their slimy relatives sink into the mud and murk in which they live? Alas, never, I suppose. Just once, I’d like to see a heroine tell her supposedly prettier, selfish, OW-in-training sister where to get off, but it will never happen I suppose.
(view spoiler)[ Emma is a 26 year old up and coming news anchor, working on a local broadcast but with a shot at a national spot that has opened up. She is saddled with an absolute bitch of a younger sister, Camilla, whose “fairy prettiness” masks selfishness, stupid impetuosity, and a bitter jealousy of her older sister. Camilla is engaged to a rich local squire-type whose managing mama is reluctantly going along with the engagement. So when Camilla gets drunk at a party, wakes up (alone) in a bedroom at the hero's house, and wrecks his Ferrari while making her getaway, she is panicked that the demands for damages will ruin her chance at marriage to her rich fiancé. Long suffering Emma, who has more or less raised Camilla since their mother died when Emma was 10 and Camilla 6, agrees to talk to the hero to see if they can come to some kind of payment arrangement (Note to Harley heroines: stop enabling your shitty relatives! Cut them off! Let them hang!).
The heroine has an interview for a national news anchor job in London, so sets up an appointment with the hero for the same day. The hero, Drake, is a rich and ruthless businessman, who by age 34 has built up an empire from a hardscrabble beginning. He has recently acquired a media enterprise, which includes a girlie magazine called Macho. The heroine, being smart and in the news business, knows this background information about him, as well as the fact that he is reputed to be both shrewd and dangerous.
She has her interview and gets the job. She’s warned that viewers expect their female newsreaders to be “morally sound,” which pisses her off because double standard, but she, like we, must just go with it. On the way out, she is openly ogled by a “tall and broad” jade-eyed man who “exuded an air of power and vitality.” Yes, it is our hero, come to check her out. Her hackles are up immediately.
She goes to her appointment with Drake Harwood, and he is, of course, the ogler. He tells her that he wants full payment for the Ferrari’s damages unless she will pose for his girly mag. WTF, hero, that’s slimy! He thinks that the publicity of a new, cool-but-sexy national news anchor posing nude in the failing magazine will help to get its circulation up. The heroine is furious but she reluctantly agrees. She’ll do the photo session but NOT take her dream job, thereby making the pictures pointless (no one will care that some nobody posed in a girly mag, so if she’s not a news anchor, he can’t use the pics). Basically, she is ruining her life to save her sister’s doubtful pending marriage with a rich stuffed shirt. Ugh, spare me martyr heroines, although Emma at least has a temper and a stubbornness that let her go toe to toe with Drake.
She does the (nudie? Lingerie? Not clear) photo session, relieved when it’s a female photographer but still finds it humiliating. She gets Drake’s written agreement to write off the Ferrari damages in return for the photos. She informs her new employers that she won’t be taking the job and quits her current job.
The hero turns up at her sister’s wedding and asks Emma why she didn’t take the job. She refuses to answer, so he starts kissing her and she succumbs to treacherous body syndrome. He tells her she’s surprised him, most women would have taken the job anyway and just let the news organization deal with the photo fallout. (Really, hero? They probably have some kind of “moral” clause in her contract, since it’s so important to them, so not only would she have been publicly humiliated by the coerced nudie pics, she still would have lost her job and good luck finding another one).
The hero needs a “beard” to stave off an old mistress—he is negotiating the sale of the girlie mag to her husband and he needs to keep the OW at bay because she is still obsessed with him He wants the heroine to travel to New York with him and pretend to be his fiancée. He knows that she won’t try to use the fake engagement to try to force him into marriage. He won’t publish the nudie proofs if she goes along with it—he admits it’s blackmail YET AGAIN but is ruthless about it. Emma realizes she has no choice and bitterly agrees.
Emma has a mock engagement and a big shiny diamond! The hero tells her she’ll need new clothes and a visit to the salon (the patented Harley makeover!) and when she protests that she is just fine with how she looks, tells her that his preference would be to see her naked with her chestnut locks spread across his pillow. That gets her thinking of the nudie pics, embarrassed, but he reads her mind and tells her he hasn’t looked at them, he just locked them in his safe. I guess I believe it? Maybe? (Oh hell no, I don't believe that for a second.)
We take the Concorde from London to New York, just 3 hours (where’s my supersonic travel in 2020?)! The hero likes that the heroine is openly and genuinely excited by the experience, unlike his usual world-weary ladies. They are staying outside of NYC at his business colleague (and OW’s) estate. OW Bianca is a sucking black hole of such magnitude as to make the heroine’s sister look like a nonstarter. She is instantly all over the hero; dismissive of his “little fiancée”; and very cruel to her long-suffering older husband. She is as evil as you want an OW to be, in fact!
Thus begins two weeks of hell, in which the OW is the WORST HOSTESS EVER, constantly macking on the hero; bitchy to the heroine, her guest; and very mean to her own hubby. At this point, even as a fake fiancée, I would have pitched a fit and refused to stay to be abused, but Emma is used to her bitchy sister and shrugs it off mostly. It does give the hero an excuse to make out with her frequently, and she has a really bad case of treacherous body syndrome.
She is worried about the hero’s effect on her, though, especially when he tells her that they will be lovers before it’s all over, they won’t be able to help themselves. She’s also worried because there seems to be an emotional, not just physical, impact on her and she’s afraid she’s going to get hurt before it’s all over.
She admits she is attracted to him, but it’s not enough, and he mocks her for holding out for love, which he doesn’t believe in. Odd, because he clearly is in love with her and all this subterfuge is to get her into his clutches, but there’s no self-deluding fool like a Harley alpha fool, so OK hero. He tells her that her so-called morals are just cowardice because she won’t come down to earth and just enjoy life for what it is—there’s nothing wrong, morally or otherwise, with enjoying sex. But Emma knows it’s not right for Emma, and she’s in love with him anyway, she realizes, and wants no part of the emotional wreckage that would result from jumping into bed with him.
Emma and Drake are either making out or bickering about whether sex without love is just dandy or not. The business negotiations take weeks. The hostess OW is unrelentingly awful to everyone. Her husband blames her depression meds. Heroine is bored and decides to go to NYC for the day. In 1985, this was dicey. Heroine gets mugged and wakes up in the hospital with, YASS!!!, amnesia! She thinks she is really engaged and in love. She also thinks they have been lovers. The hero, who has done many horrible ruthless things by now (the nudie pics and the blackmail 2x), goes along with it! Wow, hero, even for an 80s asshat alpha, that really goes beyond the pale. He plunders, she willingly and passionately participates, despite some faint misgivings and first-timer pain. But she’s really perturbed when he gets off before she does, leaving her unsatisfied and thinking there’s something wrong with her. This guy is just failing on all fronts, and I always found it interesting (and a bit amusing) when vintage authors punished their asshat macho dudes with sexual failure; I think St. Margarets pointed out recently that Kay Thorpe loved to torture her heroes with impotence, for example. But Round 2, the next morning, serves to reassure Emma that she is not, in some way, lacking (and what's with the self-disapprobation on that front, when he's the one with the quick-trigger issue?).
The next day, he’s wrapping up the sale of the magazine, and tells Emma they need to talk later. She is flustered by the night before and her continuing amnesia, but is confident her memory will return at some point. Then Bianca comes into her bedroom, and Emma’s memory comes back with a vengeance. Bianca taunts her that Drake is using her to hide the fact that Bianca and Drake were lovers, and it’s too much, and Emma responds in time-honored PJ heroine fashion by fainting.
Drake comes back later and is all “don’t I get a kiss?” and she tells him her memory is back. He taunts her that her moral code wasn't quite as inviolable as she’d believed (umm, she thought she was in a mutually loving engagement, which was perfectly fine under her moral code of “sex-with-love is fine,” dude), and she bitterly tells him she hates herself for giving into him. He looks bitter, too, when she says it.
She is stuck there, in the OWs home (wtf, INSIST ON A HOTEL, WOMAN), for another hellish week. Drake is “controlled but wary” around her, and she is curt in private but goes on with the pretend engagement. She rightfully can’t forgive the fact that he knew she was a virgin by choice but callously ignored it and “tricked” her. He tries to talk to her a few times about what happened, but she shuts him down in true *I will not clear things up through conversation* fashion, as any good PJ heroine will (rather than, you know, kicking him in the balls? LEAVING, perhaps?). Love is stupid, though, so mostly she’s just sad that she’s fallen in love with a cad who will never love her back.
They fly home, and he wants to talk it out, but she refuses. He is angry and says she is deceiving herself; she wanted to have sex with him and enjoyed it, and why was it so easy for her to convince herself she was in love with him? She tells him that on a scale from one to 10, the experience was a 100 in terms of worst experiences ever.
They get back late, and she scathingly refuses to stay at his place and takes a taxi home. She tells her father the engagement is off the next morning and he’s disappointed because he thinks she needs a man who will “occasionally overrule her,” being so strong willed herself. Thanks Dad. She visits her horrible sister, who’s smugly satisfied that Emma couldn’t keep a high flyer like Drake, and who brings her husband’s jealous attention to herself, when he questions how well Camilla knows Drake.
Camilla calls her shortly thereafter; her husband David is asking questions about Drake, and she might be pregnant to boot and David might not think it’s his and she has even thought of abortion. Emma is horrified by her crazy sister. (Please don’t breed, Camilla.) Camilla wants Emma to bring Drake to a dinner party to allay David’s jealousy. Emma, who is a pushover when it comes to her horrible sister--well, no pretty much in life really--resignedly agrees.
Drake agrees to come. Emma is surprised that her sister seems resentful that they’re at the dinner party, and her husband seems to like Drake just fine, no signs of jealousy. Meanwhile, Drake gets to espouse his views on working wives (he’s for them—doesn’t think female brains should atrophy just because there are kids and thinks balancing work and family life is possible, even necessary, for the modern 1985 woman—so go Drake! Who'da thought?). Emma is even more in love now with this enlightened version of her asshat alpha. She’s on her third glass of wine, too, and gets pissy when her stuffy brother in law points it out and suggests she forego a brandy, so she has a double and falls asleep in the car on the way home.
Only Drake abducts her to his “rambling Tudor farmhouse” (a house that shows up in certain other PJ books). He wants to talk. He goes up to change and she hears a crash and a cry and goes to check on him. He’s broken a bottle of cologne but is fine (and shirtless). He makes moves on her and she instantly succumbs to TBS, falling into bed with him, but isn’t too happy about it the next morning. He’s frustrated that she is still rejecting him, and starts all over, making her admit she wants him but she says not without love, it’s not worth it. He admits that he should never have made love to her when she had amnesia but said he couldn’t help himself, and that the whole engagement was just a way to keep her close and build a relationship (as opposed to, you know, dating and building a relationship). She reminds him he’s not into long-term, and he tells her he is in love with her. She admits she’s in love with him too. It’s marriage for life, he tells her and confesses that he made Camilla pretend that she needed Emma to bring Drake to the party. He also broke the cologne on purpose, to get her to come upstairs, so he could catch her offguard and break down her barriers. So he’s still a ruthless, manipulative bastard, but he’s her ruthless manipulative bastard, aaaand HEA?
So, this one seemed a bit unusual for PJ based on a few I've read recently—a really strong heroine with no neurotic hangups (her virginity was not the result of past trauma, it was simply a choice); a really ruthless, besotted hero who reminded me of Charlotte Lamb’s hero in Pagan Encounter; NO SPONGING; no dithering heroine, for once; and while Emma definitely was too accommodating of her sister, not quite a doormat. I'm not sure I can get behind the hero’s truly OTT blackmailing tactics and manipulative ways, but a good one from PJ—if you overlook the fact that the heroine seems to have forgotten all about the nudie pics by the end, and they’re still locked in the hero’s safe…. (hide spoiler)]...more
Just okay one for me--points for some unusual plot elements, including...(view spoiler)[ handjobs? And it's not the hero benefiting either. Hahahaha--Just okay one for me--points for some unusual plot elements, including...(view spoiler)[ handjobs? And it's not the hero benefiting either. Hahahaha--well done, AM, in breaking the mold there. Not to mention that when our hero deflowers the heroine (they hop into bed pretty quickly), he gets a little too excited, too fast too soon, and leaves her wondering what all the fuss is all about (he quickly recovers and rounds 2 and 3 are quite the satisfying romps for our heroine, so after a false start, his mojo's workin').
Our virginal (but apparently not entirely innocent) heroine is living her life, engaged to be married to a guy who likes some manual gratification but doesn't seem interested in reciprocating the payoff. Not to worry--the frustrated heroine comes to the aid of a guy who appears to be passed out in his car but is only sleeping. He's blonde (boo!), of French/Middle Eastern descent, and a sheik in his own tiny country (though we don't know that right away). He pursues the heroine, and just like that, her engagement is broken and she's in his bed. From there, our heroine doesn't seem to remember the word "no," and through some half-hearted blackmail ends up traveling to his tiny mythic country (her father is in debt; hero buys up the debt and uses it as leverage to get the heroine to do what he wants). He is using her to make it clear to his autocratic grandfather that he won't marry his cousin. The heroine, in love with her blonde Arab prince by now, ends up fleeing when it becomes clear she's just the popsie decoy to help him achieve his ends.
His mother chases her down in London and tells her the hero was terribly hurt and is pining, so she goes to him and there's a little groveling and HEA. (hide spoiler)]
Honestly, the most interesting things about this book were the (view spoiler)[handies and the premature ejaculation on the hero's part (hide spoiler)]. That's not a ringing endorsement! Overall, just meh and kind of phoned in, with an anemic alpha and a TSTL heroine. Your mileage may vary....more
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