Sam Lockhart's reputation as a heartbreaker was legendary. When his latest spoil turned out to be Fran's best friend, Fran gladly agreed to help her get even.
Step number one - for Fran to win the post of organiser for Sam's charity Valentine ball - was easy. There was an immediate respect between them - and an avid attraction. Far from feeling she was falling into Sam's clutches, as the ball approached it became clear something was amiss - this man was no heartbreaker. When Valentine's Day arrived Fran no longer wanted any part of the plan; she wanted to run - right into Sam Lockhart's arms.
I was told off as a child for making up stories—little did I know that one day I’d earn my living by writing them!
To the horror of my parents, I left school at sixteen and held a bewildering variety of jobs: I was a London DJ (in the now-trendy Primrose Hill), a decorator and a singer. After that I became a cook, a photographer and, eventually, a nurse. I waitressed in the south of France, drove an ambulance in Australia, saw lots of beautiful sights but could never settle down. Everywhere I went I felt like a square peg—until one day I started writing again and then everything just fell into place. I felt like Cinderella must have when the glass slipper fit!
Today, I have the best job in the world, writing passionate romances for Harlequin. I like writing stories which are sexy and fast-paced, yet packed full of emotion—stories that readers will identify with, laugh and cry along with.
My interests are many and varied—chocolate and music, fresh flowers and bubble baths, films, cooking and trying to keep my home from looking burglarized! Simple pleasures—you can’t beat them!
I live in Winchester, one of the most stunning cities in the world, but don’t take my word for it—come see for yourself! I regularly visit London and Paris. Oh, and I love hearing from my readers all over the world…so I think it’s over to you!
Re Valentine Vendetta - Sharon Kendrick brings us a throwback book to her Revenge is Sweet series.
This book features an h that agrees to help her old school friend get a little comeuppance on a man who supposedly wooed, seduced and then once he revoked her unicorn grooming license, dumped her like a hot potato and left her heartbroken.
The h is not too keen at first, but when she hears about the unicorn banishment and then about the big dumping moment, she is reminded of her nasty divorce from her own lyin' and cheatin' actor spouse and agrees to be the facilitator of the school friend's Grand Plan O' Vengeance.
The ill contrived plan is for the h, who is an event planner to the Irish Elite, to convince the English H to let her plan his upcoming huge charity auction for sick kids. The H is a big time theatrical and movie talent agent and holds this sorta famous event every year.
So the h gets Cormack, the Irish H playwright from Kiss and Tell, to give her a recommendation as an event planner to the H. (This h planned Cormack and Triss' son's christening. We get a small Triss and Cormack update too, they are still deliriously in love and multiplying like bunnies.)
The h tells the H that she is extremely successful in Ireland, but needs a big event like his to establish herself as an elite event planner in England. After a LOT of verbal bickering and some sexual harassment on the H's part, the h is hired.
As the h and H work on his big charity do, the H reveals that he is healing from a long time grief. His fiancee, whom he loved very much, died from a fatal illness several years earlier. Since this H is so incredibly handsome women won't stop propositioning him and the ladies in his former job wouldn't stop harassing him to let his celibate heart heal in peace, the H decided his life needed to change.
This propelled the H to leave the big talent agency he was working at and strike out on his own. (The former agency he worked in is where he met the h's old school friend.) The H claims that he has been mourning his lost love and building his own company for the last several years, but ironically his distaste at being harassed by the ladies doesn't stop his own harassment of the h.
The h shows an interesting turn of thought herself as she continually remarks on many of the H's manly and handsome male attributes. But they also bicker a lot and by the time the big charity do rolls around, the h is uncertain of her feelings for the H.
Enter the h's old school friend, who has supposedly been engaging in very self destructive behavior after the H's callous seduction and swears that a small confrontation and closure will set her right. The old school friend also brings along several ladies who claim they too have been used and abused by the H.
The h believes that these ladies are going to waylay the H at his charity ball and give him a little telling off, so she lets them into the event. Right before the big charity auction is to start, the discarded ladies surround the H and the old school friend grabs the mike from the stage and publicly berates the H for taking her virginity and then dumping her.
The h flees the whole event in the aftermath, she is getting the sinking suspicion that there is something 'off' about all of these women and their claims.
Somehow the h gets blamed for the old school friend's public denouncement - (which kind of did not make a lot of sense, the h only planned the event and it ran perfectly, so I am not sure what the whole point was aside from SK authorial maneuvering,)- and she starts getting a lot of cancellations from her Irish clients.
(Which also made no sense, cause these clients were all in Ireland and I wasn't convinced that they would be all that interested in an English charity event. )
Anyhows, the h is pondering her life and wondering if the H really did what the old skool friend claimed, when the H shows up and blackmails her into doing another party for his famous actress mother.
The H has already told Cormack from the prior book that he really intends to seduce and then dump the h as payback for what the old school friend has been announcing to the world - the school friend also did a big photo and story layout in some tabloids.
The h feels a bit bad about the whole thing and she doesn't have a lot of clients at the moment anyways, so she agrees to help the H.
The H and h again get into the verbal debate mode and the lurve force mojo starts rising. Eventually the H and h do have their big night o' love and the h believes the H is sincere in his feelings for her and she is very sincere in her feelings for him - along with totally lusting over him every chance she gets.
Then Cormack shows up and spills the beans about the H's intent to pump and dump her for revenge and the h decides she is once again done with men and goes back to Ireland.
The H shows up a week or so later and berates her for believing Cormack and leaving without talking to him, because he claims the more he got to know her, he decided to abandon his own Grand Plan O' Vengeance.
But the h trusts Cormack more than the H because Cormack is the Irish Eugene O'Neil and was extremely kind to her when things blew up with her actor ex husband. So the h sends the H off and gets a bit huffy, but then the old school friend calls.
The old friend is excited to announce she is getting married, so all her publicity seeking has paid off. Then she tells the h the truth about what happened with the H.
When the H's fiancee died, he gave up on the ladies and focused on mourning and his career. This did not stop all the women he met from chasing him - even tho he claims he was extremely clear that he was mourning his lost love.
The old school friend worked with the H and pretended to be his friend, but was really planning to seduce him. On the anniversary of his fiancee's death, the school friend got the H drunk and then took advantage of him in his grief stricken and plastered condition.
When the H woke up to the school friend the next morning, she thought he would be all eager to start a relationship and instead he told her he would not date her if she was the last woman in the universe and kicked her out. Then he went and started his own talent agency.
The other women that turned up at the H's charity event were all former co-workers that made a play for the H and got turned down. The h is pretty furious over the deception and hangs up on her now former old school friend and takes off in her bathrobe kimono to track the H down and declare her True Love Forever.
The h catches up to him as he is checking out of Dublin's most posh hotel and still in her gold kimono bathrobe, the h confesses her love. The H tells her that he was partly to blame too, because he should have explained what happened with the school friend instead of obfuscating about it.
Then he declares his love for the h back and we leave them happy and in love for the big HEA.
I wasn't really a big fan of the H for most of this and it was really easy at first to doubt his veracity about the sexual harassment and if he was as celibate as he claimed.
But by the end of this, (even tho I wasn't a fan of the characters,) I had to kinda gape in awe at the way SK totally turned the standard HP sexual harassment and assault trope totally on it's head.
When we finally get the real details of the school friend's assault on the H and listen to him blaming himself for somehow inviting such an attack, it really hit hard on how quick I was to blow off his earlier indications of assault and treat him as just another womanizing H.
For that reason alone, this book is pretty masterfully done. The gender reversal in this is extremely well scripted right up to the big reveal and even tho I wasn't really buying the HEA, I do recommend a small day trip with this HPlandia outing for the sheer genius of SK's very excellent writing.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
This book, along with two others, was my introduction to Mills & Boon when I was 15-16. It randomly appeared in my house one day without me noticing (we have upwards of 5000 books, so that's not unusual) and I can only assume someone picked it, and its companions, up during a hospital visit.
I remember being intrigued by the concept of a book where you knew you were going to get a happy ending - the teen romances I'd been reading to that point sometimes ended well, and other times in tragedy, and you never knew which you were going to get.
As a 15-year-old, I quite enjoyed this, although even back then I referred to it as "a bathtub book - you can read it in the bath, and if you drop it in the water and ruin it, no biggie." Sadly, as an adult, it doesn't hold up well.
Fran is a 26-year-old party planner. When her childhood friend Rosie calls her in floods of tears over Sam, the jerk who took her virginity and broke her heart, Fran is appalled and angry, so she agrees to help get even by humiliating him publicly. But as she gets to know Sam, she finds that the truth may not be as black-and-white as Rosie led her to believe...
Firstly: do 26-year-old women typically act like 13-year-old girls? At 15, it didn't occur to me that few 26-year-olds would be so juvenile as to a) want to get revenge on a man two years after he dumps you; and b) risk your career to help a friend do so. Also, the rationalisation given for Rosie's (and Fran's) anger? "And in spite of not loving you - he took the most precious thing you had to offer?" Yuck. Any book that treats a woman's virginity as "the most precious thing you (have) to offer" is probably going to get on my nerves. I prefer sex with someone I love, and I'm certainly not opposed to waiting till you're in love to lose your virginity, but nor do I subscribe to the idea that it's the most valuable thing about a woman.
The revenge takes the form of Fran becoming the party planner for Sam's upcoming Valentines charity ball, and then having Rosie (and some other women that Sam allegedly broke the hearts of, although it turns out that he just turned them down and they couldn't handle it) humiliate him in front of his friends, donors, and the charity he's raising money for. In what world is this a good idea? Even if the guy really truly deserves it, in what world is this a good idea to do *at a charity event*? But they do it, and then Fran is honestly, truly shocked that nobody else wants to hire her to plan their parties and her career is wrecked. Really. She's surprised. Somehow this didn't occur to her.
Sam hunts her down and decides she owes him, and so she's going to help him plan ANOTHER party, this time a birthday party for his mother. Cause that sounds like a swell idea, right? Personally, I wouldn't have hired Fran for the first one; she was pretty rude to him. But that's just me. I apparently have more survival instincts than Sam does. Then they have sex, or fall in love, or some combination. I'm not sure, it all seems to happen off-screen.
So the plot was bizarre. How were the characters? Well, Fran's kind of an idiot, as evidenced by her inability to foresee the consequences of ruining the ball. (And she's a *party planner*. Aren't event planners supposed to be good at, I dunno, planning ahead? Figuring out what could go wrong in advance, and making contingency plans?)
Sam - Sam's sometimes nice enough, but most of the time he's rude and abrasive. I can't totally blame him for this, since he's clearly suffering from English Hero Syndrome, which is a chronic condition affecting approximately 9/10 British romance heroes. Symptoms range from taciturnity to aloof snarkiness to outright cruelty, and can be found in most of the men in the Mills & Boon Presents and Modern lines, as well as books by a number of chick-lit authors. I actually tend to stay away from most Brit romances, because it seems almost a requirement that the guys - and often the girls - act like assholes right up until they start falling in love with each other, and I just can't imagine falling for someone who's not really a very nice person. Anyway, Sam is snappish and rude, and I've no idea why Fran falls for him, let alone all those other women who apparently wanted him enough to be angry that they didn't get him.
There are a couple other small annoyances, like the author's tendency to use inappropriate words. (Calling the robe Fran slipped on a few times "her kimono" is one that particularly stood out for me. I do not think that word means what Ms Kendrick thinks it means. One does not just "slip on" a kimono to answer the door - they take quite a while to put on, even with assistance, and few Japanese now wear them for anything but the most formal ceremonies.) They're just minor bugs, but they give an impression of sloppy writing.
So this one's going into my to-sell pile. I see that I have several Sharon Kendrick books on my bookshelf that need to be read, so perhaps one of those will be a better fit for me.
This did, however, open me up to the world of romance novels as a teenager, so for that I'll always be grateful.
Buku ini menceritakan kesalah pahaman Fran terhadap Sam Lockhart. Fran mengira bahwa Sam adalah seorang playboy, pria yang telah melukai hati sahabatnya. Untuk membalas sakit hati temannya tersebut, Fran berusaha untuk menjebak Sam, dengan merencanakan pembalasan pada saat pesta hari valentine yang diadakan di tempat Sam. Namun dalam merealisasikan rencananya tersebut, Fran mengetahui bahwa sahabatnya tidak mengatakan hal yang sebenarnya, bahwa Sam sebenarnya tidak bersalah. Untuk itu Fran harus dapat memutuskan perasaannya yang sebenarnya terhadap Sam. Dan apakah ia akan jatuh cinta pada pria yang dianggap sebagai playboy tersebut. Banyak kisah-kisah lucu yang terjadi dalam buku ini, seperti saat Fran berusaha untuk merusak pesta valentine Sam.
As Sam Lockhart was devastatingly handsome, it wasn't surprising that he had a reputation! So when Fran Fisher heard that Sam had broken her best friend's heart, she gladly agreed to help her friend get even. The first part of their plan— for Fran to organize Sam's charity Valentine Ball— was easily achieved. There was an immediate respect between them— and sizzling attraction. But as the night of the ball approached, it became clear something was amiss— this man was no heartbreaker. Now Fran's Valentine wish was no longer revenge--but to have Sam all to herself!