Mills & Boon, £2.80, ISBN 978-0-263-84828-0
Contemporary Romance, 2006
The Mediterranean Millionaire’s Mistress is brought to you by Maggie Cox and the letter L—L for “Lies are bad, bad, BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD!!!”
You see, Ianthe Dane at the opening scene announces to all and sundry that she has lost her best friend to breast cancer. However, she is more anguished by the fact that, after taking some ancestry test on a lark, she realizes that she has been adopted all along.
Okay, so her parents had been nothing but kind to her, albeit overprotective—but we all know what happens to romance heroines when they are left to their own devices, so I can’t really fault the parents here.
However, the fact that they lied to her all this while completely negates all that they had done for her since she was a brat. They are now nothing to her, because lies are lies and liars and liars and now Ianthe has PTSD from being lied to. How dare they not announce to her when she was a girl that she was an adopted brat! She would probably be more well-adjusted today had the parents been sensible and treat her like a red-headed stepchild so that she could even be a bigger victim today.
So, Adopthed here travels to Greece to seek out more information about her real family, only to be happily impaled right down to the mighty root of the family tree of our millionaire Lysander Rosakis.
Our hero has his own PTSD too. You see, his wife betrayed him when she agreed with his father that our hero should concentrate on the family business instead of playing at being a photographer. Then, that faithless whore had the temerity to die while giving birth to their stillborn kid. How dare that worthless cretin hurt him like this?
Now, our hero is riddled with perpetuate anguish of being a millionaire unable to get over the fact that his wife didn’t agree 100% with him when she was alive, and hence he would never trust another woman ever again.
Understandably, therefore, he lies to Adopthed that he isn’t a wealthy millionaire, and I’m sure we can all guess what the dramatic conflict of this story is.
That’s right, Adopthed will spend the rest of the story wailing and whining about being lied to. Sure, one can argue that Lies-ander is a moron that keeps telling dumb lies for the stupidest of reasons, and I won’t disagree at all. but the heroine can’t seem to put things in their proper perspective at all.
The moment she discovers that she is lied to, or she thinks she is lied to, she completely flies off the handle, acting like even the most trivial white lie is the most heinous harm one could have done to her.
She even weaponizes the fact that her fake parents lied to her and therefore they have harmed her so deeply to lash out at Lies-ander: if he cared for her, he would have remembered the monstrous sin her parents inflicted on her and made sure that she would never be lied to again!!!!!!!!!!
It’s all so ridiculous and unnecessarily overwrought, and it also makes Adopthed looks positively unhinged. She needs therapy, not pee-pee, that’s for sure.
Still, there is some kind of novelty in seeing the hero of a Modern romance being the one that has to pass the heroine’s unreasonable purity test, for once, and I have to admit that there is some unintentional comedy is seeing the heroine fly off the handle so often. Plus, it’s hard to take this story seriously because the “LIES! I AM SURROUNDED BY LIARS, OMG I AM GOING TO DIE!!!” antics of the heroine is so one-note dumb.
Hence in many ways, while this is a pretty crap story, it’s also one of the less toxic and painful Modern romance I’ve come across in a long while. Read it for the unintentional comedy, the stupidity of all, perhaps; just don’t read it in search of a good story or characters or romance.
