The Billionaire Bachelor by Jessica Lemmon Series: Billionaire Bad Boys #1
Published by Forever on June 30th 2016
Pages: 286
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Manwhore. That's what the board of directors-and the tabloids-thinks of billionaire bachelor Reese Crane. Ordinarily he couldn't care less, but his playboy past is preventing the board from naming him CEO of Crane Hotels. Nothing-and no one-will keep him from his life's legacy. They want a settled man to lead the company? Then that's exactly what he'll give them.
Merina Van Heusen will do anything to get her parents' funky boutique hotel back-even marry cold-as-ice-but-sexy-as-hell Reese Crane. It's a simple business contract-six months of marriage, absolute secrecy, and the Van Heusen is all hers again. But when sparks fly between them, their passion quickly moves from the boardroom to the bedroom. And soon Merina is living her worst nightmare: falling in love with her husband . . .
I’m going to say from the onset that it’s Jessica Lemmon’s writing that brought me here, even though this particular trope isn’t exactly what I typically go after. That much does good writing matter to me and my decidedly lackluster review in no way any reflection on the quality of it.
But while I do like the marriage of convenience that Lemmon writes about here, I took issue with the Reese Crane, whom I thought was simply an unredeemable arse through and through. Cold, closed-off and unfeeling, it was hard to accept that an intelligent man like him became a womaniser because he concluded women on the whole, couldn’t be trusted to stay after a nasty experience with a cheating ex and a mother who had died in an accident when he was a teenager.
I couldn’t really see a change in his detestable behaviour, not even at the end when it seemed as though a switch suddenly flipped and he decided in his own time, that he wanted everything that he’d lost with Merina back. Perhaps what frustrated me more was that Merina – who had actually invested time, and emotional energy in him and played by his blackmail rules made it all too easy with a rushed and abrupt HEA that left me unsatisfied. In short, Reese’s misdeeds more than outweighed the measly kind of damage control that I’d expected him to do (but didn’t) and I finished the epilogue not having the kind of closure that I needed.
