Mills & Boon, £2.99, ISBN 978-0-263-86433-5
Contemporary Romance, 2008
Now, now, people, don’t get too excited. It is with great regret that I have to reveal that the heroine is not a love slave in any capacity in this story.
Also, some people may have their imagination stoked by the possibility that Miranda Lee’s The Millionaire’s Inexperienced Love-Slave in question may be referring to the hero, but come on, romance heroines love money as much as we love syphilis.
No, this is actually a rescue fantasy of the heroine.
In this one, Sharni Johnson had lost her husband and child to a train accident. While she managed to get a pretty significant settlement from the railway company, she is currently lost in a funk, grieving and only making baby steps in moving on with life… only to regress completely when she spots a dead ringer for her husband.
Mind you, she falling for a man that looks like her husband is presented as a good thing here. Of course, we can argue that Adrian Palmer is much more loaded than her dead husband, and since he’s a romance hero, his penis is probably ten times bigger too, so yes, she’s definitely getting an upgrade of her worm food of a husband.
However, is this kind of romance healthy? I would be more concerned about the red flags being pitched all over the pages here if the story hadn’t been so blooming terrible in a good way that I have a great time laughing at it for all the wrong reasons.
Anyway, I am getting way ahead of myself.
Back to Sharni, she immediately approaches Adrian the moment she realizes that he looks so much like the man that she was married to, and demands with all the grace and subtlety of a deranged bull rushing into a china shop after doing too much drugs:
“Are you absolutely sure? I mean… I don’t want to cause trouble, but some parents don’t tell their children they’re adopted. Is there any chance at all that you could be?”
How does one even answer that deranged question?
Stlll, Adrian really must love to stick it into the bat-dung crazy, because he is moved by the sexiness of this woman charging up to him with no doubt wild and unnaturally bright eyes glowing with insanity to demand that he confesses to her that he is indeed adopted.
I don’t even know what kind of closure can she expect to learn that Adrian may be her dead husband’s long-lost twin brother. What’s if he is? She has no claim to him—is she going to stalk him or something?
It will be hilarious if she did, because Sharni is horrifically hapless here. I’m not kidding—this entire story is created to have Adrian bend over in many sexy contortions, some that would send lesser men that want to emulate these positions to a chiropractor, to make sure that Sharni will forever be coddled and never has to think or do anything for herself ever again.
In a way, this is a nice fantasy, as Adrian, unlike most of his counterparts in the Modern line, is an actually decent bloke that is as generous with attention and money as he is with his body fluids when it comes to his ladies. If I were in Sharni’s shoes, this story would be only about 50 pages long because I would absolutely do anything he wants me to do as long as he will give me access to his bank account forever and ever, amen.
Since this thing has to go on for much longer, however, Sharni keeps putting on her hapless doe-is-me act so that the hero will gallantly run to her side and pat her in the head—there, there, ignore scary reality and just focus on his pee-pee so that she will never have to think about anything else again.
That is, when she’s not giving constant, annoying lip service that oh no, so she’s putting out to the hero, but dear readers that may be pursing their lips in sour judgment by that point, be assured that she’s really not the kind to put out. No, she isn’t… okay, so she puts out again faster than a vacuum cleaner in a filthy hovel, but really, readers, look at her wail and flagellate herself about how she is sweet and pure! Her constant putting out is not a sign of slut ahoy—it’s.. it’s… her true love, that’s it, it’s her true love that makes her drop her panties each time she gets horny she wants to express her pure and pristine love.
It’s probably a given, as this is a Modern line, but Sharni is also absurdly clueless about sex, dating, and life in general. Oh my goodness, Adrian lives in a penthouse! He must be… rich! Oh god, is that a penis? She can’t deal, she is blushing so hard that her blood vessels are going to spontaneously explode and she will likely die from hemorrhagic stroke in the next ten seconds unless she gets laid first.
Our heroine acts, talks, and speaks like she’s a child finally experiencing the real world. Oh my goodness, she’s eating… in a fancy restaurant… with Adrian! This is… this is…
Come on, what is this? This is a widow of considerable years. Why is she acting like she had been chained in the basement all her life until, with the death of husband, she can finally leave the house for the first time ever?
Additionally, she is so desperate for praises and validation that she puts on this disingenuous Anne Hathaway accepting her award act all the time for the romantic denouement. Oh, surely Adrian can’t love her! He has all the sexier and hotter women that come running to him when he beckons and gestures at his humongous pee-pee! So he treats her like the sweetest princess in the world, using all his money to spin the perfect romantic rescue fantasy for her… that means nothing because he doesn’t spell out his feelings, so she’d continue to mope and whine and writhe in torment that she’s surely such an ugly troglodyte in his eyes!
What, he finally says those three words? Oh, he loves her now? Thank you! Thank you world! Now, she finally realizes at last that she is indeed the most beautiful, sexy, perfect woman in existence. She is now ready to ascend to the upper pantheon of femme supreme and you bitches can suck it she will never forget how much everyone loves and adores her and calls her perfect as she now embarks on the perfect life that she graciously accepts to be her justly entitled reward for being so, so awesome.
It’s insane. This story is so demented in how it portrays Sharni as this socially clueless, perpetually weak, and useless wretch that I can’t help finding it to be one of the most unintentionally cray cray-funny stories I’ve read in a while.
How can I not? This is my favorite part of the story; it has me laughing out loud so hard.
Aside from being a brunette, Sharni was different from every women he’d ever dated. They’d all been highly educated career girls whom he’d met through his work.
I love it when both the hero and the author admit, with such refreshing honesty, that Sharni is an uneducated failure.
All things considered, this is a terrible thing with a heroine whose stupidity and helplessness is a sight to behold. At the same time, it’s so over the top stupid that I can’t figure out whether the author is trolling everyone or the story just happens to be this fun to read and laugh at through the most fortuitous kind of accident. It doesn’t matter, really. I’d laughed and had fun, so yeah, mission accomplished.
