Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-90821-3
Contemporary Romance, 2014
Carole Mortimer’s A Bargain With the Enemy is the start of a series featuring brothers whose first names are those of archangels to go with their last name D’Angelo. It’s okay if one misses this, because the author will remind readers of this over and over and over. She really wants this series to take off, I see.
I’m not sure what the bargain is suppose to be here, as it means both parties are getting something out of a give and take process. However, the heroine Bryn Jones is so desperate to spread her legs for the hero Gabriel D’Angelo—his name is that of an angel because D’Angelo, and don’t forget to buy the books that will have his two brothers with angelic names too, peeps—that she doesn’t require much from him aside from a wedding ring.
Wait, so that is the bargain?
Gabe of the Angels once put her father behind bars, and Bryn recalls this occasionally when she’s not dripping horny juices from every bodily orifice of hers at the sight of his face.
She is an artist desperate to have her works displayed because she had been soundly rejected by other galleries in town. Oh, I’m sure she’s talented, it’s just that in the Modern line, women are shamed and ostracized for the sins of their parents like it’s the 19th century all over again. So yes, Bryn is desperate.
Of course, she has changed her name and the superficial aspects of her appearance to start life anew after her daddy did the jailhouse rock, but you know how these heroines are. They don’t do things all the way, and apparently her eyes are so distinctive in a beautiful way that Gabriel and his Brothers With Angel Names So Buy Their Books Damn It all see through her disguise right away.
Fortunately from Sour Bryn, Gabriel has always been in love with her and I suppose he also loves courting sexual harassment suits, so he pretends not to know her and signs her on to his gallery.
Now, Gabriel’s greatest sin here is that he’s a bit dim and he’s led all over the place by the little buddy in his pants. I have to check the cover a few times while reading this thing, because this man is too benign to be a hero in the Modern line. He never does any of the usual Modern hero playbook stuff like calling the heroine all kinds of synonyms for prostitute, knocking her up and accusing her of sinful harlotry for getting pregnant, abandoning her while complaining that he’s the one that is most injured by their constant stupid misunderstanding marathon, and more.
I guess this makes him a total failure to readers that want and expect those toxic heroes in a Modern story, but me, I feel like I’m having an out of body experience while reading about this guy, and it’s not really a terrible experience. It’s actually… a relief of sorts to not want to constantly wring the hero’s neck and experience bitter disappointent because he’s not a real person that can be wrung that way.
Of course, I can never be allowed to be happy, so Sour Bryn naturally takes it upon herself to ramp up the cray cray.
Oh boy, where do I begin? How about the fact that she overreacts to everything in a histrionic manner—screaming, wailing, weeping, and even fainting at times—like she’s desperately craving Adderall but the world has run out of it? Couple this to her propensity to jump to the worst wrong conclusion to everything and I get a wretch that is constantly +9,999!!! and making the reading of this story a most draining experience.
Also, she lusts after Gabriel so hard and so bad, but naturally, this is passed off as love because we don’t want people to think of our sex-crazed ho as a sex-crazed ho. However, every time she’s had her fun getting Gabriel to do mouth on mouth as well as other parts on her, she suddenly remembers that she’s a virgin and he’s put her father behind bars so no, they have to stop as the author wants to save all her super horny scenes for her self-published stories.
Likewise, Gabriel also stops after she gets off because he wants her first time to be truly special.
Hence, this story is just Sour Bryn being a hysterical hen all the way interspersed with scenes of always second base, never the third because these two characters are idiots and the author needs an excuse to prolong the whole ordeal of the reader. Oh, this is a painful chapter? Keep reading, fam, the hot sex scene will come soon.. just keep reading!
Oh yes, one more thing: the author goes out of the way to make Bryn look dumber and dumber as the story progresses. My favorite moment is how Bryn somehow can’t tell that the shirt she is wearing is so sheer that the hero has a full view of her breasts. In a single scene, the author makes the hero look like a slobbering pig and the heroine a basket case.
As for the romance, it’s just lust. He’s already in love with her and she he because they find the other person hot. There is no concerted effort on the author’s part to let these characters discover that the other person is more than a pretty face. No, it’s just “You’re hot! I’m in love! Let’s get it on… well, until second base that is!” all the time.
Aside from the addled romance and the tedious heroine, the story is also a dull suspense-free one. The hero and the reader are aware from the first page that Sour Bryn’s disguise has fooled no one, but the heroine reels from left to right to up to down to left again for about five or six chapters as she hysterically worries whether the hero knows of her real identity.
The entire story, therefore, is a test of how much the reader can appreciate, or at the very least, tolerate the heroine’s terminal stupidity and endless melodrama, ugh.
A part of me wonders whether the author hates writing this story so much that she wants to inflict the same amount of pain on the readers. If that’s the case, come on, the readers are the innocent party here. Instead, why not just go key the car of the editor that insisted on this story being the way it is?
