Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-89141-6
Contemporary Romance, 2012
Sigh. The sticker on the cover of Anne McAllister’s Breaking the Greek’s Rule tells me that I, a reader of this line, stands a chance to win £5,000 on Christmas, while the heroine here wins the heart of a Greek tycoon. Real life versus fiction – the dissonance is never clearer.
I’m sure you all know what Alexander Antonides’s rules are. No falling in love, because his brother once fought with him over some Matchbox toy car and Alex believes that he somehow gave his brother leukemia after that fight. What, he thinks he’s an X-Man or something? He wants to marry, because all the men in his family marry, even if these days he’s not really into sex with women, but no, he’s not in the closet or anything, people. He insists that he will be an undemanding husband so long as the wife understands that she’s to spread to him when he feels like it, but one woman is not right to worship his mighty penis because she wants to have kids quickly, the other just wants to quit her job and have a family of her own, and that other one doesn’t like that he never wants to have children. It’s really so hard for an undemanding husband-to-be to find a suitable wife, I tell you – all he wants is for her to put out, don’t ask him for anything, don’t care that he doesn’t love her, doesn’t mind how he treats her, doesn’t bother him when he’s not horny. See? He’s a nice guy!
Daisy Connolly believes in love, so she refuses to use her matchmaking skills to help him find a wife. How can she subject any poor woman to that thing? Oh, out of the way, people, she’s so swept away by the atmosphere, she’s going to mount that penis right now.
Seriously, why do assholes get women so easily in a Mills & Boon Modern line again?
Okay, she has a secret, which of course is the very thing he doesn’t want. I’m sure you can guess what that thing is, as the story practically jackhammers me in the head with its clumsy foreshadowing.
Right, this book. Okay, it’s not bad, but that’s mostly because Anne McAllister is an author that is too good for the tired, cringe-causing story lines she has to write for this line. Sure, in the end Daisy says the right things and tells Alex what an annoying douchewaffle he is, and he does a pretty convincing personality do-over to win her back. Still, Alex starts out as such a laughably ridiculous caricature of a Modern line hero that I can never take him seriously, and Daisy may display some common sense in the end, but her behavior for much of the story is as much an enabler of Alex’s nonsense as everyone else in this story.
This one, therefore, is an alright book for what it is. Still, there’s only so much of Alex’s tedious, histrionic whining that I can take before I itch to pull at his earlobe and drag him to see a shrink.
