The book starts with a woman showing up for an interview with a mysterious, naturally dominant CEO whose entire staff is composed of beautiful, blonde women. Upon meeting him, she immediately stumbles and hopes he doesn't notice. He's sexy A.F. and our male lead.
Stop me if you've heard this one before. What's that, you say? "50 Shades", you say? Well, you're in luck, because this one actually has a plot! And no contracts over 50 pages!
So, the female lead is investigating the murder of her best friend, Elena, who used to be a model for a fancy magazine, and who died of a suspicious overdose. The female lead isn't a detective or anything, just Really Concerned.
She doesn't get the internship at the company where her friend used to work, but she meets a photographer outside the building who offers her a job as his assistant - and yay, he's the brother of the CEO and also part of the powerful family running the operation.
But between the female lead and the CEO there's a certain attraction, one that's riddled with danger, because his family is OLDER AND MORE POWERFUL THAN THE MAFIA!!!! And involved in all sorts of shady business and sex trafficking stuff and sex cult-like stuff. Oh, noes. The horror.
Anyway, what this all amounts to is a story about a woman who's not exactly a virgin (she had ONE boyfriend before) encountering the mysterious, dominant, kinky lead and falling right into his arms, whereby he discovers he has a heart and a soul and he loves her nearly instantly because she's beautiful, innocent, pure, and stubborn, and unlike his usual women.
The sex is supposedly kinky, but it's the sort of kink you'd dream of if you were entirely vanilla - except for this one time when he makes her wear nipple clamps. And then she wears them *under her bra* for a *whole bunch of time*, which just... doesn't sound great. Other than that, he orders her around a bit and threatens her with things that never happen, such as bondage and spanking, while thinking to himself that yup, this is exactly the kind of rough sex he loves. (Dude, you're supposed to have experience with this shit, what's up with you telling her to go down on her knees and considering that rough?)
I went into this hoping for something like "The Story of O", and instead I got "The Story of 50 Shades If Someone Added Some Plot To It", but it becomes ridiculous towards the end with the sex cult things.
The Romanian edition is so bad it's almost good. I have no idea if the team was so into this that they were working on it with one hand, or so desperate to finish it that they worked on it while watching a movie, but the book is riddled with typos and editing issues, and the verb tenses are all over the place. You have brilliant scenes such as her looking for the Vatican on the seat of a car, but the buildings are too tall for that; or someone looking at the female lead as if she were a "piece of a book" (the intention here was a piece of meat, they really are one letter apart - carte/carne) (but you know, like, #mood, I do look at books like that), or her dangling on his tongue (I'm not even sure what that was trying to be). So kudos to the ream, their, er, Easter Eggs really made my day.