Mills & Boon, £3.30, ISBN 978-0-263-88673-3
Contemporary Romance, 2011
The US edition of Jennie Lucas’s Reckless Night in Rio has a demure cover, while this Mills & Boon edition is positively salacious in comparison. Look! The heroine is wearing a dress that shows a hint of cleavage. That’s positively X-rated by the standards of the ironically-named Modern line!
You think I’m joking? When the story opens, the younger sister of our heroine Laura Parker pesters the darling to name the father of her two-year bastard, er, brat.
Apparently 19-year old Becky likes to do this every other day, and Laura is too well-mannered to tell her sister to go duck her head into a pot of boiling water. Instead, this time she says that she has no idea the whom father could be, which earns Laura a loud berating about how dare Laura sleep around with men that she isn’t love with. OMG what a ho!
Really? We’re now letting these 19-year old brats mouth off to us with their know-nothing, judgmental half-wit nonsense, in public mind you, without at the very least rewarding her efforts with a smack in the face with a tray?
Fortunately, Laura is saved from the life of shame when the man that she had, er, one reckless night in Rio with reappears in her life and offers to pay her a lot of money to pose as his fake fiancée.
Gabriel Santos was her boss, and he’s a complete POS. He’s hot though, and hence, the sight of him finally forces Laura into a much belated puberty. We all know how these virtuous women can be, don’t we? One flush of desire and they need to put out, now, at once, oh give it to them baby, but don’t judge, because conveniently enough, the object of their desire is always their true love.
So yes, they had sex, and it was so good that the author actually describes Laura had having wept for joy during the experience. No, I’m not kidding.
I’d think she might have sniffed some glue before she got her virginity deflowered, but that’s not likely because we all know Modern heroines are goody-goody types that will never take anything filthy or disgusting down their throats or up their nostrils.
That means Laura could be just unhinged, and that sounds about right to me.
After the loud weeping and writhing of her joyous night of passion, Laura then virtuously announced to Gabriel that she’d need to resign the next day to spare the hero the shame of having to be held accountable for where he stuck his pecker into. Alas, she was heartbroken when he then shrugged and said okay, good luck. No, really, he said that to her.
Thus, our heroine ran off to be a struggling single mother, living in shame of not being married to the man that knocked her up.
Still, she loves him, which is why she will never inconvenience him by asking for child support or anything. Only hos do that, you know. No, our heroine is a good woman, and now, she is finally rewarded for her patience and virtue when the hero finally decides to come look for her because he has a use for her. If only we women are equally fortunate!
Oh, and even when she’s rotating her legs like the blades of a propeller at high speed on his pee-pee, she will never tell him that he’s a daddy. You see, he doesn’t like brats at all, and heaven forbid that a woman should make a man feel uncomfortable in any way about the notion that he may not be the center of the universe. Only hos do that!
Okay, so Laura is a brain-damaged twit that deserves to be put down out of mercy. However, Gabriel isn’t any better.
That man is such a douchebag that he’s unreal. He doesn’t do marriages or long-term crap, but he’d make do for Laura being his mistress because we all know virgins are professional hot stuff in bed. So, she can live in a separate floor with her brat, and he’d call her up whenever he wants some pokey-pokey!
Occasionally, Laura will tell Gabriel that she’s not his sex slave or something, but that’s just lip service. All he has to do is to beckon, and she’s ready to assume the wholesome but horny virtuous woman gagging for it position for him.
By now, you may be thinking that I may have mistakenly given this one three oogies, but the thing is, both Gabriel and Laura are so, so, so outrageously dumb and unlikable that they become more like cartoon characters. At some point around the third chapter, I start chuckling and later laughing at the absurd motivations and actions of these two complete imbeciles.
This story ends up being a first class “Are you KIDDING me?!!” train wreck material that has me actually howling out loud at various points. I find myself cheering for Gabriel to make Laura cry some more, because I like to see her suffer.
I also laugh at how Laura keeps assuming the worst of herself and Gabriel just to continue wallowing in misery, and how no matter how angry or whatever she is with him, she’s always ready to drop down her skirt whenever he’s horny. She is so dumb, it’s hilarious.
Sadly, the heroine is too stupid to make the hero suffer much here, and as a result, the fun here is one-sided, with the stupid heroine being the punchline on every page while the hero gets away with too much of his nonsense. Bah, but I suppose I can’t have everything.
Still, while this thing is more brainless than reckless, it is entertaining for all the wrong reasons and I can’t really say I have a horrible time reading this. Compared to many other titles in this line, this one makes it so easy to enjoy the heroine’s suffering—to the point that the most depressing moment of the whole story is the part where she gets her happy ending. Bummer, that means that the fun has ended.
Oh well. I’d had fun though, and that’s more than I can say of my average experience reading the books in the Modern line!
