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Destitute Until the Italian's Diamond
In this dramatic marriage of convenience romance by USA TODAY bestselling author Julia James, Lana must say “I do” to the Italian or risk losing all…
From betrayed and penniless…
To wearing the billionaire’s ring!
“I wish to discuss a proposal of marriage between us.” Model Lana can’t believe the words uttered by Salvatore Luchesi—or that the crushing debts her ex left her with are forcing her to make a deal with the devil.
Lana knows that Salvatore is in an unfamiliar business bind that can only be solved by taking her as his wife. But while Lana’s head agrees to take the Luchesi name, her traitorous body craves the forbidden touch of her sinfully attractive new husband…
From Harlequin Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds.
From betrayed and penniless…
To wearing the billionaire’s ring!
“I wish to discuss a proposal of marriage between us.” Model Lana can’t believe the words uttered by Salvatore Luchesi—or that the crushing debts her ex left her with are forcing her to make a deal with the devil.
Lana knows that Salvatore is in an unfamiliar business bind that can only be solved by taking her as his wife. But while Lana’s head agrees to take the Luchesi name, her traitorous body craves the forbidden touch of her sinfully attractive new husband…
From Harlequin Escape to exotic locations where passion knows no bounds.
- GenresHarlequinContemporary
201 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 26, 2022
16 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Julia James
718 books164 followersJulia lives in England with her family. Mills and Boon novels were Julia's first "grown up" books she read as a teenager ("Alongside Georgette Heyer and Daphne du Maurier."), and she's been reading them ever since.
Julia adores the English countryside ("And the Celtic countryside!"), in all its seasons, and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. She also has a special love for the Mediterranean ("The most perfect landscape after England!") — she considers both are ideal settings for romance stories! In between writing she enjoys walking, gardening, needlework and baking "extremely gooey chocolate cakes" — and trying to stay fit!
Julia adores the English countryside ("And the Celtic countryside!"), in all its seasons, and is fascinated by all things historical, from castles to cottages. She also has a special love for the Mediterranean ("The most perfect landscape after England!") — she considers both are ideal settings for romance stories! In between writing she enjoys walking, gardening, needlework and baking "extremely gooey chocolate cakes" — and trying to stay fit!
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 30, 2022
2.5 stars. Granted, I’ve not read a ton of uber-modern HPs, but I *have* read enough HQN in general to know:
1) This is an extremely slow, no-plot read. The only obstacles are the H/h’s own hangups, thus they harp on THE SAME THINGS over & over. Also, the OW is a nonstarter; she’s an immature teen & the hero is in no way interested in her beyond required public politeness. (Likewise for the h’s ex; he never appears on-page & can rot in hell so far as she’s concerned.) So if you’re looking for delightfully evul!! OW/OM shenanigans, you’ll be disappointed. (I was.)
2a) This hero is a soggy beta, one of those boring New Age males that PC arbiters are bent on stuffing down HP readers’ throats. He’s not cruel, rude, ruthless, or unreasonable. He doesn’t deal in punishing kisses or cathartically rough sex. He’s not out for vengeance or atonement. He’s not angry at the universe or anyone in it except for a vague distaste for his philandering father’s philandering ways. Yup, he preaches that tired crappy-parental-example complex, i.e. “my dad slept around & my mom was a martyr, therefore marriage will never succeed for me because I am their son.” 🥱
2b) I realize some people might not think it’s a bad thing for a hero to lack these traits.☝🏻And in the hands of a skilled author (easy example: Mary Burchell) you’d be right. But authors like MB are able to compensate for quiet characters by weaving an interesting story about their relatively quiet conflict. In contrast, this book’s “low key” was so non-flamboyant as to be sleep inducing. I was practically begging the hero to make an effort of any kind—but he continued to be passive, bland, & beta while spouting continual Consent Reassurance. Blargh. 🤢
3) There’s no legit conflict. (See all of the above.) I liked Lana in the beginning, but her insistence on refusing to sleep with Salvatore was beyond extra—not to mention a worldly-wise model (who wasn’t even a virgin!) not thinking to use The Pill during weeks & weeks of boinkfests, then being surprised when she gets knocked up?? WHAT. 🤯
As I said…2.5 stars. HQNs are such that one stinker doesn’t mean you won’t like another by the same author, so at some point I’ll probably give Ms James another shot. But I didn’t really take to her writing style or bland plot; it felt too safe & generic Category(tm) for my taste.
1) This is an extremely slow, no-plot read. The only obstacles are the H/h’s own hangups, thus they harp on THE SAME THINGS over & over. Also, the OW is a nonstarter; she’s an immature teen & the hero is in no way interested in her beyond required public politeness. (Likewise for the h’s ex; he never appears on-page & can rot in hell so far as she’s concerned.) So if you’re looking for delightfully evul!! OW/OM shenanigans, you’ll be disappointed. (I was.)
2a) This hero is a soggy beta, one of those boring New Age males that PC arbiters are bent on stuffing down HP readers’ throats. He’s not cruel, rude, ruthless, or unreasonable. He doesn’t deal in punishing kisses or cathartically rough sex. He’s not out for vengeance or atonement. He’s not angry at the universe or anyone in it except for a vague distaste for his philandering father’s philandering ways. Yup, he preaches that tired crappy-parental-example complex, i.e. “my dad slept around & my mom was a martyr, therefore marriage will never succeed for me because I am their son.” 🥱
2b) I realize some people might not think it’s a bad thing for a hero to lack these traits.☝🏻And in the hands of a skilled author (easy example: Mary Burchell) you’d be right. But authors like MB are able to compensate for quiet characters by weaving an interesting story about their relatively quiet conflict. In contrast, this book’s “low key” was so non-flamboyant as to be sleep inducing. I was practically begging the hero to make an effort of any kind—but he continued to be passive, bland, & beta while spouting continual Consent Reassurance. Blargh. 🤢
3) There’s no legit conflict. (See all of the above.) I liked Lana in the beginning, but her insistence on refusing to sleep with Salvatore was beyond extra—not to mention a worldly-wise model (who wasn’t even a virgin!) not thinking to use The Pill during weeks & weeks of boinkfests, then being surprised when she gets knocked up?? WHAT. 🤯
As I said…2.5 stars. HQNs are such that one stinker doesn’t mean you won’t like another by the same author, so at some point I’ll probably give Ms James another shot. But I didn’t really take to her writing style or bland plot; it felt too safe & generic Category(tm) for my taste.
December 29, 2022
DESTITUTE UNTIL THE ITALIAN'S DIAMOND by Julia James was Harlequin Presents #4030, published in August 2022. I bought the book on a whim, probably because the face of the woman on the cover vaguely reminded me of Lady Gaga (of whom I'm a fan). This thin 218-page novel took me four months to read because I was busy doing other things at the time. In fact, I probably would not have finished it in 2022 without the incentive of wanting to get it done before it ended up in my "Books I Read in 2023" list instead. With that said, one might assume that I found this to be a dull book that I avoided reading, but in fact I enjoyed it and thought it was well-written overall. It's just that, as I say, I had other things to do, and also because the nature of the romance genre itself made some of the characters' thoughts and actions seem needlessly prolonged and unnecessary. (But more on that later.)
Our heroine is an English fashion model named Lana whose parents recently died in a car crash. In her grief she had gotten involved with an up-and-coming blond actor named Malcolm who ended up using her for her money and leaving her in debt. Our hero is the wealthy Italian Salvatore Luchesi, whose parents died in a plane crash. Salvatore has a business partner named Roberto whose daughter Giavanna is eager to be married to the unwilling Salvatore. When he meets Lana at a party in London, Salvatore hatches a plan that will solve both of their problems: if Lana agrees to marry Salvatore for one year, he will pay the financial debt that Malcolm saddled her with. Lana will play the part of his wife, which will get Salvatore off the hook of having to marry Giavanna and allow him to eventually disentangle his business affairs from Roberto. Lana agrees to this marriage of convenience (a familiar romance trope) and she moves to his home in Italy, appearing to all the world as his devoted wife. Gradually both Lana and Salvatore realize that they are falling in love with each other, but Lana resists his physical advances since that would make her feel like a prostitute (though the word itself is not said), i.e., being paid for her sexual services. Salvatore is eager to make love to her, but the complication on his end is that he does not wish to be permanently married to any woman, due to the negative example of his parents' marriage. (His father had affairs, but his mother stayed married to him anyway.) For their honeymoon, Salvatore takes Lana to a remote log cabin where they spend their days together, just the two of them enjoying nature. This forced proximity (another familiar trope) eventually causes Lana to succumb to her body's desire for Salvatore. Their sex scene is on pages 156 to 159, with another on page 172, i.e., a total of only five pages; I had expected a Harlequin Presents to have a bit more, but perhaps it depends on the author.
The book allows both hero and heroine's feelings and thoughts to be represented on the page, back and forth in separate sections, although both sex scenes are limited to the heroine's perspective. There also seems to be more of her thoughts shown overall than his, which has the unfortunate effect of making Lana seem somewhat timid, internally whining about her feelings rather than expressing them honestly. An integral facet of the romance genre is that we know how it will all turn out in the end, with the two main characters getting together and their problems resolved, and the fun can be in seeing how the author is able to bring this promised resolution about -- hopefully in a credible and satisfying way. Unfortunately we readers in the meantime must sometimes endure the characters worrying about things that we know aren't going to happen anyway, given the fait accompli of the genre's HEA. Sometimes it can feel like a waste of a reader's time to hear them continually fretting about their contrived situation; it's done to create drama, but it can become tiresome after awhile. A few times I wanted to wring their necks for not being more honest with each other, although the blame for this frustration lies entirely with the author for writing the story that way.
Another common trope is the third-act breakup of the couple and, sure enough, we get that when Lana discovers she is pregnant on page 180. Instead of confiding in Salvatore like a rational person, she abruptly leaves him and returns back to her home in England, filing for divorce. (It's explained that she did this to spare him having to be trapped in a loveless marriage like his father was. Or rather, she explains this to the reader, but not to Salvatore, who is left feeling rejected and abandoned with no idea that she is pregnant with his child.) It felt like more manipulation by the author, to create yet more dramatic tension, when the two villains of the story, Malcolm and Giavanna, return to cause more misunderstandings between Lana and Salvatore. (Salvatore thinks that Lana has left him for Malcolm, an idea encouraged by Giavanna.) Eventually it all gets straightened out in a somewhat melodramatic final chapter (not counting the epilogue) where Lana and Salvatore finally express their true feelings aloud for one another in big chunks of dialogue. Kinda makes me wish they had done that earlier on, but then I guess it wouldn't have made for as dramatic a story.
And yet, a little less drama would have been fine with me: I liked the characters and could have read about them just enjoying their lives together without having it forced to fit into the confines of a traditional romance-novel plot with its attendant tropes. "Traditional" is probably the key word here, since this book had the feel of an old-fashioned Harlequin romance novel. For example, no mention of condoms or birth control was made during the (brief) sex scenes. When Lana unexpectedly gets pregnant, there is no consideration whatsoever that she simply get an abortion. I didn't want her to have one, but it would have been more realistic to at least have her consider (and then reject) the option. Perhaps the author might have felt that any such consideration would ruin the heroine in the eyes of some pro-life readers, or cast doubt on Lana's love for the baby's father at their eventual reuniting. Whatever the reasoning, it made the novel feel a little less grown-up than it ought to have been.
Despite my gripes above, I enjoyed reading this novel. It wasn't a masterpiece, and it wasn't perfect, but I liked the characters and I thought the writing itself -- the words that the author used to describe things, for example -- was well-done. I was glad that I read it, and would be interested in reading more books by the author. Heck, I wouldn't mind reading this one again at some point in the future, and hopefully faster this time. I rate it 3 (out of 5) stars.
Our heroine is an English fashion model named Lana whose parents recently died in a car crash. In her grief she had gotten involved with an up-and-coming blond actor named Malcolm who ended up using her for her money and leaving her in debt. Our hero is the wealthy Italian Salvatore Luchesi, whose parents died in a plane crash. Salvatore has a business partner named Roberto whose daughter Giavanna is eager to be married to the unwilling Salvatore. When he meets Lana at a party in London, Salvatore hatches a plan that will solve both of their problems: if Lana agrees to marry Salvatore for one year, he will pay the financial debt that Malcolm saddled her with. Lana will play the part of his wife, which will get Salvatore off the hook of having to marry Giavanna and allow him to eventually disentangle his business affairs from Roberto. Lana agrees to this marriage of convenience (a familiar romance trope) and she moves to his home in Italy, appearing to all the world as his devoted wife. Gradually both Lana and Salvatore realize that they are falling in love with each other, but Lana resists his physical advances since that would make her feel like a prostitute (though the word itself is not said), i.e., being paid for her sexual services. Salvatore is eager to make love to her, but the complication on his end is that he does not wish to be permanently married to any woman, due to the negative example of his parents' marriage. (His father had affairs, but his mother stayed married to him anyway.) For their honeymoon, Salvatore takes Lana to a remote log cabin where they spend their days together, just the two of them enjoying nature. This forced proximity (another familiar trope) eventually causes Lana to succumb to her body's desire for Salvatore. Their sex scene is on pages 156 to 159, with another on page 172, i.e., a total of only five pages; I had expected a Harlequin Presents to have a bit more, but perhaps it depends on the author.
The book allows both hero and heroine's feelings and thoughts to be represented on the page, back and forth in separate sections, although both sex scenes are limited to the heroine's perspective. There also seems to be more of her thoughts shown overall than his, which has the unfortunate effect of making Lana seem somewhat timid, internally whining about her feelings rather than expressing them honestly. An integral facet of the romance genre is that we know how it will all turn out in the end, with the two main characters getting together and their problems resolved, and the fun can be in seeing how the author is able to bring this promised resolution about -- hopefully in a credible and satisfying way. Unfortunately we readers in the meantime must sometimes endure the characters worrying about things that we know aren't going to happen anyway, given the fait accompli of the genre's HEA. Sometimes it can feel like a waste of a reader's time to hear them continually fretting about their contrived situation; it's done to create drama, but it can become tiresome after awhile. A few times I wanted to wring their necks for not being more honest with each other, although the blame for this frustration lies entirely with the author for writing the story that way.
Another common trope is the third-act breakup of the couple and, sure enough, we get that when Lana discovers she is pregnant on page 180. Instead of confiding in Salvatore like a rational person, she abruptly leaves him and returns back to her home in England, filing for divorce. (It's explained that she did this to spare him having to be trapped in a loveless marriage like his father was. Or rather, she explains this to the reader, but not to Salvatore, who is left feeling rejected and abandoned with no idea that she is pregnant with his child.) It felt like more manipulation by the author, to create yet more dramatic tension, when the two villains of the story, Malcolm and Giavanna, return to cause more misunderstandings between Lana and Salvatore. (Salvatore thinks that Lana has left him for Malcolm, an idea encouraged by Giavanna.) Eventually it all gets straightened out in a somewhat melodramatic final chapter (not counting the epilogue) where Lana and Salvatore finally express their true feelings aloud for one another in big chunks of dialogue. Kinda makes me wish they had done that earlier on, but then I guess it wouldn't have made for as dramatic a story.
And yet, a little less drama would have been fine with me: I liked the characters and could have read about them just enjoying their lives together without having it forced to fit into the confines of a traditional romance-novel plot with its attendant tropes. "Traditional" is probably the key word here, since this book had the feel of an old-fashioned Harlequin romance novel. For example, no mention of condoms or birth control was made during the (brief) sex scenes. When Lana unexpectedly gets pregnant, there is no consideration whatsoever that she simply get an abortion. I didn't want her to have one, but it would have been more realistic to at least have her consider (and then reject) the option. Perhaps the author might have felt that any such consideration would ruin the heroine in the eyes of some pro-life readers, or cast doubt on Lana's love for the baby's father at their eventual reuniting. Whatever the reasoning, it made the novel feel a little less grown-up than it ought to have been.
Despite my gripes above, I enjoyed reading this novel. It wasn't a masterpiece, and it wasn't perfect, but I liked the characters and I thought the writing itself -- the words that the author used to describe things, for example -- was well-done. I was glad that I read it, and would be interested in reading more books by the author. Heck, I wouldn't mind reading this one again at some point in the future, and hopefully faster this time. I rate it 3 (out of 5) stars.
March 27, 2025
Just an average read. The heroine is a well-behaved blonde fashion model. The hero is an Italian with loads of money. The Other Woman is a spoiled Italian teenager with a killer body and a huge sense of entitlement. (She's the only one who seems to be enjoying herself.) None of these characters are all that interesting. From Dirt to Diamonds was much better!
Read
April 9, 20241 year of work to pay off an entire mortgage is a pretty good trade imo
September 4, 2023
Oh good grief. When was this written? The heroine behaved like she’d lived in the 19th century. Having agree to a marriage of convenience with the hero so that she could pay off her mortgage, she decided she couldn’t possibly have sex with him because he was paying her. Despite him pointing out he wasn’t paying her for sex, she insisted it would make her feel like a prostitute. This was her hang up!
Aside from this ridiculous motivation, I found this book turgid and pedestrian. It was so slow, full of descriptions of outings, furniture and food. I kept waiting for stuff to happen. No such luck!
The prose was flowery, twee and over the top, with the dialogue being particularly unrealistic.
This was simply a no-plot story that failed to engage me. Sorry.
Aside from this ridiculous motivation, I found this book turgid and pedestrian. It was so slow, full of descriptions of outings, furniture and food. I kept waiting for stuff to happen. No such luck!
The prose was flowery, twee and over the top, with the dialogue being particularly unrealistic.
This was simply a no-plot story that failed to engage me. Sorry.
June 14, 2025
thanks for the gift mom but this book was not good :)
January 15, 2024
This is my first review and I have to confess that I am frequently obsessed with unsexy details that no one cares about. I have a lot of questions about the main plot of "Destitute Until the Italian's Diamond" by Julia James. Lana is in debt for 400K now so she agreed to marry Salvatore to receive 400K in 12 months when they divorce. Why didn't she ask for more money? Wouldn't that debt accumulate interest? What loan accompany would wait a year to get paid? Wouldn't she still have to pay monthly installments? The plot is interesting but some parts seems rushed.
July 16, 2022
Love it
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews