Mills & Boon, £3.49, ISBN 978-0-263-89983-2
Contemporary Romance, 2013

Our heroine Miller Jacobs needs a signature on a prime contract badly, so that she can make partner at her bank. Thing is, this client is a sex pest and he expects her to make herself available in every capacity and position before he will sign the contract.

TJ Lyons is fat, however, so sadly, that rules him out as a sexy sexual-harasser and verbal abuser that romance heroines will go into rapture over. Plus, he’s not even Greek or Italian, so poor TJ is demonized instead of romanticized.

Her friend, a lawyer mind you, advises Miller to be careful because sex pests like TJ rarely get their just desserts. In fact, if things go awry, chances are Miller will be the one that will be kicked out of her company.

Never mind, our heroine has worked too hard for her career, so she will… get a fake boyfriend! Yes, boyfriend, because that will totally stop TJ Weinstein here.

Sigh. From the get go, Michelle Conder’s Living the Charade is already marred by the fact that it has a plot that only romance readers can love and appreciate.

Miller does so many stupid thing in a procession of the dumb-dumbs that I can only wonder whether the author wants me to cringe at the heroine’s antics.

For example, having famous playboy and motor racing star Valentino Ventura—hahahaha… wait, that’s really his name? My bad, I’ll try to look sad and hahahahahaha, does his parents hate him or what?—passed off as her boyfriend, so this means it will be super messy to un-boyfriend him later.

Also, being a playboy’s latest of his many, many girlfriends isn’t going to convince the TJ Weinsteins of the world that she isn’t up for fun times with other playboys. I’m just saying. There are other better candidates for fake boyfriends, but no, Miss Brainy here decides to go ahead with this guy.

Throughout the story, Brainy is also the last to notice even the most obvious things around her. Every time she realizes something that everyone else already did, she would go, oh, she was just busy with work and all, you know, but she’s not fooling me. Dumb is dumb, and worse, dumb is forever.

Miss Brainy is already brimming with likability, so the author has her subject Tino to some really unworthy drama.

Tino is actually pretty decent for a hero in this line, and in fact, he gives up his entire lifestyle and even career to accommodate our heroine’s many neuroses and insecurities. In return, he gets accused of being all kinds of horrible and terrible by our heroine, mostly because she is projecting her own issues on him. She has some serious issues with men and trust, so naturally, she accuses him of these things and pushes him away like he’s smelly chewed gum stuck on the sole of her clown shoes.

Good thing that he’s willing to take her back without a fuss after she finally experiences her epiphany and realizes that she’s a moron. Yes, the heroine’s entire story arc culminates with her realizing, at the climax of the story, that she’s an imbecile. I’m glad that Brainy finally experience some degree of self-awareness, but yeah, she made me sit through her incessant marathon of dumbassery so excuse me if I weren’t going to stand up and applaud her. Just like with everything else, she’s the last to know that she’s the biggest moron in the room. Yay, good for her, here’s her participation trophy so please have her step up to me so that I can beat her with it.

Have I also mentioned that our heroine had slept with only one guy and found the whole thing so forgettable, that she couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to have sex? Then, when she sees Tino, she immediately experiences self-induced mini-orgasms from the thought of him, and let me find that quote, “inside her”. Yes, an italicized inside for good measure, and she’s soon making out with Tino as well.

Recalling that she can’t appear as too forward or too into sex, or else sexually frustrated and fat romance readers will despise her and start calling for the author’s head, Brainy then goes through the usual song and dance of getting horny and humpy with Tino, only to then accuse him of being the lecherous pig, and later bemoaning the fact that she wants him so, so bad but she’s also certain that she’s only going to be a notch in his bedpost.

So yes, our heroine is horny all the time, which makes her get increasingly irritated at Tino because heaven forbid a modern, independent career woman to be in control of her libido and, you know, not have sex with the hero if she knew that would be a bad idea. No, she wants the pee-paw, she gets the pee-paw, and she then blames him for giving her the pee-paw.

Anyway, I’d think Living the Charade is a sly reference to how, underneath her exterior, Brainy is a mess of a cray cray waiting to come up with red eyes blazing and knives out to skin bunnies with gusto, but I doubt the author has put that much thought into it. In fact, the title is likely to be one of the dozens in a jar, randomly picked out by the editor 12 months before she even told the author to write this thing.

At any rate, this is the story of a horridly unlikable and spectacularly dumb heroine that is unable to control her inner horny hungry hippo, but somehow it’s the hero’s fault that she’s in love with him and has put out to him a hundred and one ways from Sudan to Switzerland. The hero is completely agreeable to play her game and humor her constant nonsense, and I can only wonder whether her honey pot is that good, given that Brainy has nothing else going for her. Seriously, don’t sleep with crazy, and don’t read their stories either.