Rose Linden, American waitress and virgin, marries Lars, Swedish Baron, and is kidnapped by Xerxes, wealthy Greek-American. Everyone has such awesome names! I mean, Rose is a bit standard, but I could go for another thousand romance Xerxes.
On his private plane, Xerxes tears the wedding dress from Rose’s body, tells her that she’s a clumsy kisser, and whisks her away to his Greek island. It is the first of several beach locations in their abduction romance. This romance is all about yearning to lick seawater off sun-kissed flesh.
For some reason, he has an uncomfortable chair in the private bedroom in the back of his plane. That’s so Rose can wallow in being uncomfortable in her knickers and a blanket while she dwells on her fate, because it wouldn’t do at all to wallow and worry in a bed. I don’t get this at all – was this chair freestanding? Why would you waste the space on some random chair? How big is this private plane? Does the chair have a seatbelt? Xerxes doesn’t come to wake Rose up until the plane’s landed, so this all seems very unsafe.
Xerxes initially thinks that Rose is a terrible person. Super-hot, but she’s clearly conspired with Lars to steal the fortune of Lars’s real wife, who is in a coma in an undisclosed location. Xerxes will trade Rose back to Lars if he divorces coma girl, and lets Xerxes have her.
Rose, once it is impressed upon her that she’s not married to a Swedish Baron, decides that those faint reservations she had about letting Lars near her virgin flesh were valid. She’s through with Lars. Xerxes is soon convinced of her all-round goodness.
Not that this helps Rose much. She’s a little glum, because she’s 29 and that clumsy kiss was her first kiss, and where’s her True Love, dammit? The one and only man she is meant to surrender her most precious hymen to? She’s been waiting for years. Everyone else in her family got themselves a true love, it’s not fair.
Of course Rose’s family irritated me, but they weren’t around much, so it was fine. Rose is a nicely feisty heroine, and after the gown-tearing and clumsy kiss, Xerxes makes it clear that he’s going to be a very accommodating kidnapper. He’s not going to jump her unless she wants to be jumped (promise), and he’s not going to tie her up or starve or drug her, or play any weird psychological games. She’s just not allowed to call her family or go home, until Xerxes gets coma girl back. Rose is mostly fine with this, since obviously she’s a nice person and wants coma girl to be rescued.
Xerxes says he’s a bad man, but this is like a heroine saying she’s ugly: we’re not really expecting it to be true. Xerxes is at least a little tortured by his plan to trade Rose, especially after he starts falling for her. The trade did have a weird vibe to it. On the one hand, Rose didn’t have to follow through and sleep with Lars once Xerxes had coma girl back, so it didn’t seem that high stakes, but on the other: Lars was creepy. Really creepy. He kept calling Rose ‘Petal’ and he’d already played these mind games on her about her weight and she hadn’t eaten for days before the wedding. Plus, that whole thing where he doesn’t outright killing coma girl, but definitely doing his best to make sure she didn’t get medical attention beyond what would keep her alive. Lars was a great villain, I enjoyed him.
Probably, Rose and Xerxes should have paid more attention to his creep-potential, but they were both a little dim.
And, they had this really irritating conversation about business! Xerxes has made all his cash breaking apart companies and selling the bits off, and Rose thinks this is mean. She’s doing business studies, and her world view on how business should work is based on her dad’s company. Her dad inherited a candy factory, and when it fell on hard times he refused to sell out because there would have been layoffs. He kept it going on the hope that everything would get better. It didn’t.
So everyone lost their jobs anyway, and I really don’t see how this is helpful. Xerxes was actually pretty decent about not rubbing Rose’s nose in how unrealistic her world view was. He didn’t even call her father a feeble no good leftie, and Rose fortunately missed his implication, because she was too busy being all sanctimonious about her perfect family. So this whole thing put me in agreement with the nasty capitalist, which is very unfair, because I much prefer to be all ‘yeah, revolution! Form a co-op! Be your best alt self and take the fat cats down!’ Dammit Lucas, don’t make me expose the inconsistencies in my own world view.
Anyway, Xerxes and Rose worked well as a romance couple. Xerxes thought Rose was adorable and perfect in every way. Rose had significantly less perfection to deal with in Xerxes’ case: he kept her in the dark about some important stuff. But he was really hot, and did an enjoyable number on her hymen.
Sure, it has angsty moments, but there is nothing serious about this book, and it was delightful. I am totally on board with a hero kidnapping a heroine so he can rescue a girl in a coma. Babies and small children would also be acceptable. I’m a little partial to an abduction romance, and if the heroine is given a legitimate reason to go along with it, and I can pretend that Stockholm Syndrome isn’t totally predicated on sympathy for legitimate reasons, I’m fine.