Bridal Bargains: The Tycoon's Bride / The Purchased Wife / The Price Of A Bride

by Michelle Reid

Motive

When Claire Stenson met Andreas Markopoulou she was desperate, trying to look after her baby sister alone. He offered to marry Claire and adopt Melanie. But it seems Andreas wasn’t quite the answer to her prayers – he was certainly prepared to deceive his new bride!

For Xander Pascalis has bought himself a wife! Helen is lavishly expensive but headstrong and refusing to share his bed! So Xander carries her off to his private Greek island to get the wedding night she’s so far denied him…

Marriage

Mia Frazier agreed to her father’s demand that she marry Greek millionaire Alexander Doumas for her own reasons – not money! Alex won back his family island, Mia’s father would get a grandson, but could Mia’s motive stay hidden now she was carrying Alex’s child?

677 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Hi, my name is Michelle Reid and I’ve been writing for Harlequin Mills & Boon for the last twenty years, and the crazy part about it is that I only realised it had been twenty years while updating this page!

So, hang on for a minute while I take this huge milestone in....

Twenty years with almost forty books published or in the pipeline ... I know it isn’t a great average when compared with some authors but it sounds pretty good to me!

So what was I doing twenty years ago before I wrote books? Well, I did the all of the usual things, like growing up and attending school, finishing at secretarial college, which I hated, then spent the next several years wandering aimlessly from job to job. Eventually I met my husband, we married and produced two daughters who then grew up and between them presented us with two gorgeous grandsons and one beautiful granddaughter. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Somewhere in between my girls growing up and the grandchildren arriving on the scene, I started writing. To this day I don’t know why, unless it was a natural progression from my never being without a book close by—often several—because books have always been an important part of my life for as far back as I can recall.

So, I started to write, by hand at first, scribbling short stories in notebooks which never saw the light of day. At some point I discovered Mills & Boon Romance books and that was pretty much it for me. I’d found my new love, as in reading romantic fiction and inevitably writing it too.

So twenty years on and almost forty books on, here I am still writing and still loving it!

Reviews

[Aou · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 full stars are for The Price of a Bride !

[Gogol · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the first story, The first time the hero sees the heroine is when she runs out in the middle of the street to give her wicked aunt he credit card she’d dropped in her flat, and a car collided with her, the hero cares for her because she had broken her wrist and bruised her ribs and was bleeding, and when she faints she takes her and her infant sister, whom her aunt had been pressuring her to give up for “adoption” to his own home to help her through her next few weeks. That same night the hero propositions the heroine to marry him so that he can legally adopt her half sister and present both her and the infant to her dying grandmother who wished to hold her great grandchild in her arms before she left her mortal coils as his wife and child. He tells the heroine that his family are pressuring him to marry his widowed sister in law and presenting the heroine to them would be a preemptive measure, and that after a while he’d set her free and her half sister would inherit all his fortune. During the process of traveling to Greece from London and setting everything up, the heroine falls in love with the hero and their marriage of convenience becomes real or so the heroine think. A few twists and turns later, that the heroine realizes that her mother’s unknown lover with whom she’d had her half sister was the hero’s dead brother, and that her aunt had been blackmailing the hero all these months by telling him that the heroine herself had been the woman having an affair with his brother and the blood money for her silence to keep the scandal quiet was being given to her (the heroine) in the middle of all this brouhaha we also learn that that the hero’s first wife who’d had killed herself a few years prior, had been infertile even before marrying the hero but had dragged the hero through a convoluted song and dance making him believe that he was the infertile one and surprise the heroine is pregnant. I privately feel that this creative premise could have been milked much more effectively for all its angst by some other writer, since this one had some major gloops and brakes that made the whole thing anticlimactic. Three-three and a half stars

The second story, a week before her fairy tale wedding to her beloved beautiful Greek/Italian fiancé, the starry eyed, gorgeous, red headed vixen of a heroine is sent a link by her half brother that shows the hero with a young woman and a boy who looks strikingly like the hero. She goes through with the wedding fearing that should she back out, the hero wouldn’t go through a financial deal with her father or something to that effect, and there was a clause about her having a child as well somewhere in the prenuptial agreement that she’d so obediently signed, before her catastrophic revelation. But when they’re alone she whirls back to him with all her righteous anger and wild accusations and the hero turns out and leaves her alone for the night and later confines her to a state he had with a bunch of bodyguards, only deigning to visit her every once in a while. It’s one year later, a few days after another tabloid published another damming picture of the hero with the other woman and the child, the heroine has been in a dangerous crash, her fast sports car totaled, she’s in the hospital, and the hero is back. Looooong story short, they consummate the marriage according to the terms of the “contract” and try to have a child, there are lots of ups and downs, angst ensued because the hero thinks the half brother is the heroine’s French lover, more nail biting and suffering by the heroine who thinks the hero’s still with the other woman, until in the end it turns out that the other woman is the hero’s father’s baby mama whom the father had had an affair as a revenge from his own mother who had had an affair during her midlife crisis, but when the OW fell pregnant the mother who had been the father’s one true love had attempted an overdose and the father had banished the OW and his soon to be born son and had dropped the responsibility for them on the hero’s shoulders, and at his deathbed had extracted a promise from him not to reveal this skeleton to anyone. So the hero had to run after his mother and beg her to tell the heroine the truth. This one would have gotten minus five stars from me if it weren’t for the heroine. She was fantastic. But the stupid premise, as well as the stupid hero who doesn’t even realize how to prioritise and the whole misunderstanding angst were really awful. Therefore maybe a two.
The other story in the book is the one i have written a review about separately and is one of the best HQ books ever. Five stars for sure.
So the average rating for this bundle is a three I suppose.

[More Books Than Time · Rating 3 out of 5]

First book, Tycoon’s Bride is my favorite, partly because MR shows us a real person, suffering and all, under the tycoon wrapping. Book 2, The Purchased Wife, is also a solid 3 stars, again with a real person for the hero. I didn’t care for #3, The Price of a Bride, when I read it before and still don’t like it.

[Aditi25987 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked the storyline

[MJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

3.5's

Have to confess... The whole 'millionaire/billionaire/tycoon' stories are a guilty pleasure of mine.

Out of the three in this pack, I will easy read the first one again (so didn't see the actual twist coming - which is unusual for me cause I'm usually spot on).

The second and third were good too... Just didn't suck me in quite as much. But then, if I've already got the book open for the first, I won't be against reading them too.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the first book was the best and then it sort of went downhill from there, although the males all sounded very hot! :D