Susan Stephens, $2.99, ISBN 978-1910604328
Contemporary Romance, 2017

I’m not sure that Seducing the Princess is an accurate title for the first entry in Susan Stephens’s Royal Rebels series, as things becoming increasingly bizarre soon enough in order to get the heroine to put out without being accused of harlotry by certain factions of romance readers. In fact, is this a reprint or a reboot of an old category romance? I do wonder because the plot eventually devolves into how the heroine can lose her virginity to the hero, and that’s basically the hill that category romances live or die on.

Princess Angelika, or Angel because hey, romance heroine, is on the warpath after her father, the king, was murdered. Our princess trains hard to be the best martial artist ever, which makes me wonder because punches and kicks aren’t so hot when one is confronted with guns that evil usurpers tend to have in abundance. Still, it doesn’t matter because, as usual, the romance hero is here to make sure that the heroine never has to walk the talk.

Gideon was asked by the now-dead king to protect Angel, so he’s here to do just that. Cue the usual protective hero stuff like how he has a file that tells him she’s a virgin (the most important thing about a heroine’s personality, of course) and she’s untouched by any man and… wait, what is this story about again? Something about a threat to the heroine’s life?

Nah, it becomes all about how Angel can make Gideon give it to her without coming off too much like, you know, she wants sex for the sake of the sexy or something equally heinous. Hence, the story takes on bizarre turns like Angel asking him to provide her with baby batter so that she can bake a cake in her oven and other nonsense—story developments that make me scratch my head and wonder why we are still going through all this nonsense to get laid in an era of hook-up apps.

Why is the heroine getting laid so important anyway? The story sets her up to be this defiant heiress of a kingdom, but no, she turns out to be another overprotected damsel that needs the pee-pee.

Oh well, this story is well written and, I suppose, entertaining enough for readers looking for this kind of plot. I certainly has no issues reading this one in a single setting, because from a technical standpoint, this is a painless read. The story I am reading, though… yikes. To enjoy this story, one has to accept that every plot, whether it’s an apocalypse of world-shattering proportions or something more trivial like villains wanting to kill the heroine, eventually leads to the heroine’s down there and how she gets her man to put it up there. Sadly, I’m not that person.

In this case, because the heroine needs to get stuffed without coming off too much like she is a ho, the author makes the whole ritual so unnecessarily circuitous and bizarre that I actually wonder sometimes whether this story is set in some distant planet where such antics are expected and normal. No, it’s set in present day Earth.

This is all so extra, especially in a time when even ugly and fat people have apps to engage others that want to hook up with them. I feel tad dumber after reading this, so this me, swiping left.