Mills & Boon, £4.99, ISBN 978-0-263-92614-9
Historical Romance, 2017

Yay, here’s another Mills & Boon historical romance that picks up a rusty pike and shoves it up my nostril right up into my brain!

Indeed, author Lara Temple seems determined to make me resent the main characters in Lord Hunter’s Cinderella Heiress.

The heroine in question, Helen Tilney, has walked away from her tyrannical father and aunt to start her own life as a schoolmistress. I’m not sure how someone that refuses to and can’t conform to societal etiquette of that time could be a good teacher of any sort, but hey, romance novel logic, am I right?

Still, I should respect Helen for getting her life together as a proud, independent woman of the 19th century, until Helen realizes that upon her 21st birthday, the day when she gets her inheritance, her father posts in the papers of her engagement to Gabriel Arsepimple, Lord Hunter.

She’s the last person to know of this, so she storms the Arsepimple Hunter’s home right in the middle of a heavy rain, alone, unchaperoned, to demand to know what is happening. The hero points out correctly that she could have contacted him in a proper manner in due time, so I suppose the author wants me to view the heroine as an idiot.

Why? I guess romance heroines are cute when they are mentally deficient. We know they can’t be secret whores when they are this dumb!

Then, it is revealed that Helen has no plan B when it comes to accommodation. She’s stuck with no where else to go.

How did this nincompoop manage to start a new life again?

Of course, this entire setup is a contrivance to have the heroine captivate the hero by being all wet and useless innocent, but come on, surely there are better ways to do this than to cripple the heroine’s brainpower in my eyes.

Helen insists that she can’t stay at his place because that just won’t do. Really? She’s already put her entire reputation on the edge by stupidly storming to the hero’s place alone, especially with the hero being the predictable infamous debaucher of everything female, so why is she protesting now? If she had been so freaking concerned about propriety, she could have used her brain to plan the whole thing properly, oh my freaking god.

Really, I think the author is really sparing no effort to make me realize that the heroine is a moron.

Eventually, these two strike a deal. They will do that fake engagement thing so that he can teach her how to flirt with and win the affection of the guy she really wants.

Wait, what? Why the hell would any sane person want to marry her when she’s been engaged to and later, if all goes as planned, dumped by a guy whom everyone knows would stick all his digits into whatever female orifice that can’t flee from him fast enough. What is this moron thinking? Oh, wait, silly me, I said “thinking” just now.

Perhaps the heroine is in a tragic star-crossed love, and that she could only be together with her beloved after she has her hands on her money? That would make sense, right?

Oh don’t be silly. The guy barely cares for her, and all this grand love of hers is just another delusion of her fractured psyche.

In other words, this ghastly abomination of a romance heroine is bending herself backward and risking her reputation and hence her career and everything to get the “love” of a guy that won’t shed a tear if she hobbled in front of his carriage and got fatally run over.

As for the hero, Arsepimple is a master player that doesn’t even officially break off from his mistress by the very last page of this story, but that’s okay. The author constantly assures me that the hero and his two sequel bait buddies may appear to be callous POS douchebags that are likely riddled with every strain of STDs known at that time, but you know, these three also had been in that war and hence, they can’t be held accountable for their man-whore antics and often cruel treatment of their pump-and-dump receptacles because, you know, ooh, these POS men have darkness in their hearts or other nonsense.

Anyway, I’m done. I’m not wasting any more time and word to talk about this thing because there’s just no point. It has an idiot plot, an imbecile heroine that proceeds to make all the worst decisions possible for herself, and a hero that has all the shudder-inducing traits of an STD-riddled asshole player but none of the charm or vulnerability that would make such a character palatable.

There is absolutely no point to this thing, unless the point is complete, total annihilation of my brain cells.