Pretty blonde Sierra is just vomiting epiphanies all over her engagement party. Turns out, she’s just noticed that fiancé Ethan is a jerk. He drinks too much and laughs too loud with his buddies, and he calls her Princess in a very sarcastic tone. Why did Sierra ever agree to marry him? Did she actually agree? Does she even like him?
She doesn’t want to be like her mother, that’s for sure. Her mother drinks and plays mean girl power games with all the other rich upper class wives of their set. Sierra thinks maybe she wants to be a vet. She likes horses and, vaguely, other animals.
Then she catches sight of Harrison. He’s a duke (which isn’t important to her) and he’s so pretty. After a quick chat, they snog. Then Harrison says something Sierra takes as slut shaming for snogging a guy she just met at her engagement party, which she thinks is rude, but then she slut shames herself and runs off into the night.
Everything moves pretty quickly from that moment: Sierra’s father is arrested for embezzling from Duke Harrison, her mother commits suicide, her father has a heart attack and dies in prison, and fiancé Ethan dumps her and demands the return of the ugly diamond he gave her.
Three years later, Sierra is working as Harrison’s stable girl and studying part time to be a vet. Harrison has bought Sierra’s family’s palatial family home, and she rents a small cottage nearby. She lives there with her resentful brother Daniel, who insists that their father wasn’t a crook, and that their stuff should be their stuff. It’s causing a lot of tension, because Sierra is too nice to tell her brother to act like a 19 year old, not like a spoiled whiny brat.
Sierra has managed to avoid Harrison for three years. My opinion of Harrison’s alpha cred is very low. At any stage he could have said ‘have the stable girl washed and waxed and brought to my chambers’ and his minions would have carried out his orders. They may have originally worked for Sierra’s family, but they seem totally into Harrison, and would probably think his taking even a clearly smutty interest in Sierra was just adorable.
Daniel hits on a fool proof way of restoring the family finances: he’ll sneak into their old house and steal back their things! Nothing can go wrong with this plan! Except Sierra is not into it, and tells him to put them all back. Rather miffed, Daniel takes off. Daniel is then completely missing from the rest of the book. Sierra occasionally wonders why Daniel is not responding to her texts, other than to tell her he’s off with a bro. I found out later that Daniel has his own short story bundled with another book in this series, so maybe his adventures are later explained. Probably not. I didn’t really care, because Daniel’s crimes are background noise. They are only there for Harrison to put to use to blackmail Sierra into marrying him.
This book is the second in a series about a bunch of rich friends who were at English boarding school together. They run the gamut of classic Mills & Boon heroes: there’s a Greek magnate guy, this English noble guy, a Russian oligarch guy, a sheikh, and some American dude. While I would usually say that any series dealing with an individual hero hook-up each book can be read as a stand-alone, the plot of this one won’t make much sense without reading the first book about the Greek guy. In that, the friends all gather around the sick bed of their mentor and former headmaster, Uncle Charles. He tells each of them to sort their love lives out. Harrison has to sort out his inheritance thing with marriage. If he doesn’t get married and produce an heir within the next 18 months, his yucky Dutch cousin will inherit the ducal title and all the ducal properties.
I can tell you, from my extensive reading of entailments (i.e. I glanced over a Wikipedia entry a few months ago when I was reading a Sara Craven book to work out why entails still seem to work like they do in Pride and Prejudice) that this inheritance thing is at least half bogus. Titles still entail. The previous Duke could have disposed of the associated properties as he saw fit, so he could have been this level of jerk about it. But not the title. That’s Harrison’s until he dies. Harrison isn’t particularly fussed about the properties; he pays tax on them and leaves them to crumble. He’s got his own big bucks. However, this is all a perfect way to get the stable girl washed and waxed and sent to his chambers, with the added bonus of a wedding ring and a baby.
Sierra goes along with it all, and starts two new projects: being sad that Harrison doesn’t love her as much as she loves him, and clearing her father’s name.
I really do like this plot, and the book is amusing and silly, but I can’t pretend that this is very competently handled. I’ve given the problematic inheritance plot as an example of where the internal logic goes awry, but there are a lot more. There are a lot of books out there that do this plot with more style, and with more crazy fun, so I can’t really recommend this one.