Mills & Boon, £3.99, ISBN 978-0-263-24889-0
Contemporary Romance, 2015

Reading Carol Marinelli’s Sicilian’s Shock Proposal has Dia Frampton’s The Broken Ones playing in a loop inside my head.

You see, like every other Modern story, Luke Cavaliere is an asshole. The opening of this story sees him and his PA snarling and shrieking at one another because he’s shagged her and now he’s going to fire her because, you know, he’s bored of her and what not.

So, maybe the author wants to redeem this guy later on. At that point, I don’t know and honestly I don’t care.

You see, The Broken Ones is a nice summation of why I love bad boys in romance stories.

I love the broken ones
The ones who
Need the most patching up

This is a filthy rich and successful bloke that has every opportunity to be happy. What’s there to patch up about this? Well, aside from the head wound that I’d love to inflict on him, that is.

Maybe I see a part of me in them
The missing piece always trying to fit in
The shattered heart
Hungry for a home

The asshole can buy any number of big houses that he wants. He can sod off.

Maybe we can rip off the bandage
Maybe you will see it for what it is
Maybe we can burn this building
Holding you in

Well, there is no depth to Luke aside from… okay, maybe he does have depths, because his douchenozzlery is so deep that it’s practically bottomless.

There’s the rub: there is a distinct line separating a broken man and an asshole. A broken man exudes trauma, hurt, and vulnerability that are obvious even when he’s being the biggest ass in the world. He needs the heroine desperately, and the reader is privy to that.

Here, Luke is just being needlessly cruel. He has everything in the world to pull his head out of his ass. He can even hire all the people he wants to do that for him.

Hence, there is no reason for me to pity or empathize with him. Luke is just a very rich man abusing his wealth and privilege that comes with that wealth to just be a terrible person.

Of course, I’m easy. I can also warm up to an asshole if that fellow could display charm and seductiveness to make my toes curl. Well, there’s none of that in Luke.

I’m dwelling a lot on Luke because the rest of the story is just ugh, and had he been done right, he could have still salvaged the story. Oh well, that’s not happening here, how sad for my blood pressure.

This story exists in a time and dimension that allow men to do whatever they want without consequences. They can sleep with and dump women without being slapped with sexual harassment or paternity suits. There is no legal recourse for women that have been wronged in any way; they can only hope they are the designated heroine so that the hero will eventually come around and lower themselves to marry these women.

Hence, Luke and our heroine Sophie Durante get to be betrothed from a young age like they are Charles and Diana or something, and that’s perfectly binding because, well, plot. Sophie naturally wants Luke bad from the time she was some snotty dumb little girl, and he takes her virginity before breaking her heart.

Meanwhile, their parents betray to, lie, and kill one another—it’s all so ridiculous—and somehow this means present Sophie tries to get Luke to play at being her happy fiancé for the sake of her dying father. She insists that our hero has to do what she asks, because he owes her.

You see, him poking his pee-pee inside her and never committing to be her best boyfriend forever has ruined her. Perhaps her deflowering has caused her brain to break into pieces and ooze out of her ears and nostrils during that grand moment, I don’t know, because since that day, Sophie never finishes school or does anything meaningful in her life aside from being a hotel chambermaid that is no doubt incompetent because come on, this heroine is designed to be dumb, useless, and hapless from the get go for “romantic” purposes.

The “romance” follows then a repetitive pattern: he hurts her, she whines and acts all bitchy feisty but it’s all an act as she willingly takes him back, and the whole thing just repeats anew.

The author tries to tell me that the hero is damaged because of his father never giving him enough hugs when Luke was a kid, but I’m not so sure. Luke says and does cruel things way too easily, so I’m more convinced that it’s just his innate nature to be a nasty piece of work. Besides, if he couldn’t have her, I’ve no reason why he can’t just keep his pants zipped up and leave her alone. No, he has to have his cake and eat it too, so yes, asshole.

Again, the author blames the heroine’s damage on her parents, but the problem here is that the author is telling me instead of showing me that everything is because of worthless parents. Oh please, everyone has issues stemming from their childhood. These characters use their past as an excuse to keep perpetuating terrible behavior, instead of trying to overcome their issues. He revels too much in being a POS, while she loves being the victim just as much.

The worst thing here is how, instead of giving these characters the development they desperately need, the author decides to devote a big chunk of this story to flashbacks. The present characters are already obnoxious immature twats, so why would I want to read about that time when they were even more immature twats? Oh my god.

As a result of all of this, the two main characters never grow. They went from annoying twats to even more annoying twats before going back to the present, still twats until it’s time to force themselves to pretend to have found a happily ever after.

I know they’ve hurt you bad
Wide, the scars you have
Baby, let me straighten out your broken bones
All your faults to me make you more beautiful

Nope, none of that is happening here. The dude deserves to have more bones broken for having every opportunity to be a better person only to fail. Let me widen his scars and hurt him bad instead!

The heroine is a lost cause from the moment she appears, because she acts like she never has any agency and she can’t do anything for herself aside from letting an awful guy walk all over her.

I say we ship these two wastes of carbon materials to Antarctica or something and sacrifice a few chickens to some glorious deity that will sink their boat halfway during the journey.