Jess is a country vet. She loves dogs (she has six) and runs her own animal sanctuary, and hopes one day to have it recognised as a charity. Cesario is super rich and he and Jess once went out, and she didn’t sleep with him after dinner and wouldn’t accept any further dates, so he’s completely into her as the one that got away.
Cesario owns a country house in England, and he’s hanging out in Italy when he gets news that thieves have broken in and stolen a painting worth half a million dollars. Cesario heads over to England to find out what’s going on.
Jess’s step-dad comes over to visit her. He works for Cesario and he’s done something stupid – borrowed money from the family loan sharks, who then pressured him into giving them access to Cesario’s house because they wanted to ‘take some photographs’ and coincidentally now that painting has gone missing. He knows he’s in trouble.
‘Wow it’s so awful that you’re going to jail, but don’t worry I’ll do whatever I can to get you the best legal defence we can afford, and of course I’ll support mum, as I’m sure my brothers will,’ Jess does not say. Instead, she decides she’ll go see Cesario about whether he can do something.
Jess describes that date from hell with Cesario and it’s fantastic. He took her to a pretentious restaurant where she wasn’t dressed right, couldn’t read the menu and couldn’t work out what cutlery to use. She ate her desert with a spoon and noticed Cesario used a fork, and I am one hundred per cent on board with why this is completely outrageous, because how dare expensive service be so confusing? You are paying this huge mark up at this place, and they’re too cheap to bring out different cutlery for each course? Probably, it��s deeply unhygienic to have so much cutlery on the table at once. And dangerous. And crowded. And what is with giving you a spoon and a fork with your desert, I mean either it’s to give you options, or you’re supposed to use them both together (and does the fork deliver to the spoon or the spoon to the fork?) or for some reason, some of the desert is forked and some is spooned, and you’re just supposed to know which is which.
So, even though I thought Jess was being completely HP heroine about trying to persuade Cesario to not involve her step-father into any investigation into his stolen painting, I completely bonded with her over fancy schmancy restaurant crap and she could do no further wrong in my eyes.
Cesario is reluctant to not pursue his stolen painting but honestly: he’s failed to be imaginative enough about his super rich status. If you’re a billionaire and someone steals your painting, why do you need the police? In fact, you’re being cheap and rather awful to expect them to do anything for you, given I bet Jess and everyone in her family, even the criminals, pay considerably more tax than Cesario does. He could hire a whole army of investigators. He could create his own organised crime syndicate and terrorise Jess’s small-time and probably not that bright criminal relations until they give the painting back and donate all their money to Jess’s animal sanctuary and then go into exile forever. Sure, setting up your own organised crime syndicate to terrorise a couple of guys is illegal and will cost more than half a million dollars if you’re doing it right, but the point is: no one steals from a billionaire and gets away with it.
Probably, I shouldn’t have read this immediately after reading Kresley Cole’s ‘The Professional’ and ‘The Master.’ Those books may have slightly influenced my attitudes towards how billionaires roll.
Cesario comes up with a typical hero plan. If Jess will marry him and have his baby and then once they have the baby they’ll divorce and he’ll support her and the child, he’ll agree to not pursue the stolen painting through police etc. He also has some inheritance thing, where there’s this beautiful house in Italy that’s not his until he has a kid. This is his plan after he’s told Jess that he won’t sleep with her in exchange for forgetting the painting, and Jess has indignantly told him that she’s a 30 year old virgin. I’m sure this new plan has nothing to do with how hot he thinks that is.
Jess agrees this deal because she still thinks Cesario is hot in spite of that stupid dinner, and she’d also like to have a baby. So they do the marriage thing and go to Italy and get naked and Cesario is introduced to Jess’s scars.
At this point, I should mention that Lynne Graham appears to have declared war on ‘said.’ It’s very noticeable in her writing style, people opine, and frame and do all sorts of things to avoid having to have something they said described as, simply, said. From my count ‘said’ is used as a dialogue tag less than ten times, and rarely without an adverb. I’ve read enough ‘how to write’ stuff to know that this is considered faux pas, but Graham’s on a word budget and has a lot of plot to get across, and I’m not going to quibble about shortcuts to let me know how people are saying stuff with their emotions. What struck me was that Jess tells her scary origin story and Cesario’s response is wry. Then Jess says something and she’s rueful, and what is wrong with you two? This is serious emotionally fraught and you think there’s something funny in it?
That getting it on scene turns out to be a revelation to them both. ‘Don’t fall in love with me because I’m so great inside your body,’ Cesario warns. Jess is all ‘pfft, as if,’ but she’s hooked, and he’s hooked too. They are completely into being in bed with each other as frequently as possible. While sex isn’t a contest and both partners win when they are open and generous and etc, Jess has the moves and is totally the boss of sex. You go, you awesome thing.
There’s a lot more plot going on than I’ve described, and the last quarter packs a sudden and wonderful emotional punch. I didn’t adore Cesario as much as I did Jess, but I liked him. He had this whole wistfulness about him, and a desire to change. There’s not as much of him on the page as there is of Jess, but from what I got there was a truth to the way he struggled with being a better person than he had been, and how he sometimes failed, and I’m prepared to forgive a hero a lot if I can see what he can be, even if he can’t.