Mills & Boon, £2.89, ISBN 978-0-263-85361-2
Contemporary Romance, 2007

Massimo Androletti knows that Nikki Ferliani, the heroine of Melanie Milburne’s Androletti’s Mistress, is a ho. Why?

She led him on, made him fall in love with her, and then went and marry his stepfather shortly after.

Now, I’m sure it won’t be a spoiler to mention that the marriage was never consummated, and the heroine married the old coot because of some family obligations that propelled her to make the worst decision possible in any situation. She won’t be a heroine of the Modern line if she had at least three working brain cells, after all.

Anyway, her husband died recently, leaving her a destitute widow with no protection because that’s the best way the author can think of to get the ball rolling. Massimo steps in, calls her a ho, tightens the purse strings, calls her a ho some more, ho, oh my god, she is a whore because she slept with the man she wedded so WHAT A WHORE, whore, whooore…

I’m sure we all can see a discernible pattern in the hero’s behavior throughout the story. Oh, he’s not the bad guy, don’t be silly—that will be the ex-mistress of his that dares to take offense at being supplanted. The hero calling the heroine whore, whore, who-ooo-ore is just being adorable, so there!

The whole thing could have been avoided by a proper conversation, but the heroine naturally refuses to open up for no good reason. Worse, she also doesn’t stand up for herself. When the hero is horny, she will put up some sexy half-arsed resistance but he is so-ooo-ooo overwhelmingly male that she just has to put out. Must be the way he keeps calling her a whore, maybe he does it with a sexy baritone kind of slut shaming that always makes a Modern heroine melt inside.

Instead of letting the characters master the art of communication, the author dismantles one by one the obstacle that keeps the heroine from opening up to the hero. This is a convenient way to make sure that the heroine never has to do anything to earn her happy ending, unless I count her putting out whenever the hero wants to have hate sex with her. At the same time, this also causes the heroine to become even more dependent on the man that keeps calling her all kinds of synonyms for slag, culminating with a surprise pregnancy because these two are too stupid to practice birth control.

Naturally, the pregnancy causes the hero to be even more convinced that Nikki is an even bigger whore than he initially assumed. 

In the end, after he’s ruined her life, Massimo finally feels guilty and asks her to marry him. She does, and that’s what is considered a happy ending in this line.

So what if there is no sane reason to marry that POS? Who cares! He’s the designated hero, so marriage to him is the endgame even when there is no redeeming value to this bag of vomit.

To be fair, though, the heroine has no redeeming value as well, as she’s just a passive brain-damaged moron that doesn’t do anything aside from lamenting about what a sad victim of circumstances that she is and being a putty turd in the hero’s clutches.

This one, therefore, has a really stupid premise and the whole thing is executed in the dumbest way possible with what seems like the main objective being to drive my blood pressure up as much as possible. This is the kind of story that gives the Modern line the bad rep it rightfully deserves.