Shadonna Richards, $1.99, ISBN 978-1476414560
Contemporary Romance, 2011
I’m pretty sure Shadonna Richards’s His Island Bride is set in the present day, but the heroine Jessica Mills lets her mother browbeat and guilt-trip her into some kind of arranged marriage, because it isn’t right for a woman of 30 to be still single.
Really? Is that still a thing in 21st century Canada? No wonder the biggest import of that country is punchlines at its expense.
Well, I am willing to play along if the heroine had valid reasons to agree, but this one is tragic. She’s letting her idiot mother dictate her life because she feels insecure, as all her past efforts at landing a man ended up with her being the clown in a sad one-woman circus.
Hoping to get away from the whole having to think for herself thing, she then books a flight to Jamaica to, er, discover her ancestry or something. Oh, the poor people of Jamaica, what did they ever do to deserve this imbecile claiming to be one of them?
Meanwhile, James Carrington also goes off to Jamaica because he also has to make an important decision, and despite being a successful self-made billionaire, he finds that act very stressful so he needs to get some R&R first.
Somehow, the hotel booked them both in the same room. The author says it is due to some kind of glitch in the system, and I’d buy that if we were talking about the plotting system.
They eventually have sex.
James leaned down to her and captured her lips again as he inched closer. His lips parted and claimed her hot tongue. She enjoyed the moist sweep of his tongue. Pulsations rippled through her. He kissed her slow and his lips were still warm and moist from the kiss. Hungrily they devoured each other’s lips that left Jessica melting into his passionate embrace. Her entire body pulsated in anticipation. She could tell that he couldn’t wait to strip off her towel to get her naked. They both pulled off each other’s towels.
“God, you are so beautiful, Jess. Inside and out. You’re special, you know that?”
What, he can somehow see past her skin into her insides?
Still, Jessica is getting married, to someone she has never seen or known, you see, so she has to ditch this perfect sex machine. I’m so sad for her, because she is still alive despite having such deplorable mental faculties. How is this allowed? Shouldn’t natural selection have wiped her out via a timely close-up with an incoming truck or something?
Surprise! Guess whom her arranged husband turns out to be.
The end.
Is this a joke?
Sure, if this had been the first attempt at a romance story by a teenager, I’d say good for that person, but they should consider putting their subsequent efforts on Wattpad or something until they get a better hang of things.
The author’s bio doesn’t seem to suggest that she’s a teenager, however, so… now that I’ve mentioned Wattpad, the land of One Direction and BTS fanfics, I may as well quote the former: the story of my life, indeed.
Naturally, I can’t get that song out of my head now, and that’s a good thing, because I don’t have to think about this story anymore. Life sure turns out okay in the most mysterious ways sometimes!
