Mills & Boon, £2.99, ISBN 978-0-263-85324-7
Contemporary Romance, 2007

Make no mistake, Miranda Lee’s The Ruthless Marriage Proposal is a terrible thing to behold by any standard, but at the same time, there is something sublime about what a train wreck this thing is.

It all begins when housekeeper Emily… wait, I don’t recall ever coming across her last name. Anyway, who cares.

Let’s start again. Emily the Housekeeper realizes that she can no longer work for billionaire Sebastian Armstrong anymore. This is because she realizes that she is in love with him. Fortunately, she’s been offered a job as an assistant manager at WTFCares, so she’s about to tender her resignation.

First, she decides to skinny dip in the pool (don’t ask), which allows Sebastian to feast his eyes on her generous bounty and realize that, just like how supposedly plain types become hot once they take off their glasses, his housekeeper is similarly hot once she takes off her clothes.

Sebastian is very used to be able to take his housekeeper for granted, so of course he can’t let her resign. Well, upping her pay is a waste of money, as it’s not like the dumb woman will know what to do with the money. Let him just unzip his pants and do the sexy windmill so that our heroine will demurely pretend to be scared when we all know she’s gagging for it!

Oh, and Sebastian’s other woman is a model, so naturally she’s a despicable harlot. Oh sure, she does her harlot thing with Sebastian, including shagging him shortly before she marries some conveniently gay bloke, but surely nobody is gauche enough to blame the man! This is a romance novel, people, where men are perfect, perfect, perfect.

This story, therefore, is all about our so-called hero being an ass to the heroine while also engaging in acts of cuckoldry with his other… uh, floozy with benefit, I guess, but our heroine flails around like a beheaded chicken because oh, oh, surely she isn’t worthy of him, and oh, oh, oh, she can’t be with him but oh, oh, oh, oh, he’s now inside her but oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, she can never be with him ever, et cetera.

Emily’s motivations and logic are all over the place, so much so that she is a one-woman clown show.

For example, she decides that she must first run some kind of test to determine whether she and Sebastian can have a forever after by having Sebastian sleep with her so that she can be sure. I’m sure everyone is shocked that our hero is all for sitting for this major examination.

Why would she, however, come up with such an addled decision? She already whines that sex and love are one and the same for her, but alas, not for him? How is she going to tell that when he, er, gushes his admiration for her, it’s done with love? Is she going to do some fancy calculation using the volume, velocity, viscosity, or what?

Then there is her constant whining that yes, Sebastian can give her all kinds of earthly comforts, but how can she live with him breaking her heart?

Fair enough, I suppose, but at the same, it should be obvious that that man is a whore. He happily sleeps with women that are about to get married to someone else. Therefore, if Emily prized virtues such as love and fidelity so much, why would she even want to cast her net at him?

In the end, Emily learns from her father that men will be men. Look at him, he cheats on her mother all the time, but hey, he loves her! Somehow this motivates her to accept that Sebastian should be her true love, and that’s it.

I have to laugh because, in the end, Emily is no better than Lana the floozy. For all the author’s efforts to have Emily go through reality-defying mental gymnastics to pass off her feelings for Sebastian as true and pure, our heroine goes for the hero because of his looks and money. Personality and character have little to do with her decision. Thus, she is Lana, but at least Lana is honest about her intentions and personality.

So, this one is train wreck, yes, but I get a lot of laughs from the idiot heroine trying so hard to pretend that she doesn’t lust after a hard-bodied money bag like everyone else. Oh, he’s a ho that is against everything she claims she wants in a guy, but that’s okay, because they are in love, you see. She says so! She says so!

Oh yes, that reminds me: Emily behaves like she’s about to have a nervous breakdown each time she has to think hard for herself. This only adds to the unintentional hilarity of this thing, as well as increase the odds that she will snap one day and stab Sebastian repeatedly with a knife while screaming that she loves him and she will always do—stab, stab, stab.

I really don’t know why I find this one amusing, when I know I should be panning the crap out of it. But there you go: this is one of those stories that are so, so, so bad that it probably breaks some circuit in my head and causes me to lose quite a bit of perspective. Sure, read it for the laughs, but do so with caution!