| Title | : | A Bride Worth Millions (The Howard Sisters #2) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0373133723 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780373133727 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 192 |
| Publication | : | First published August 18, 2015 |
Athena Howard can't believe she did it. In an outrageously large wedding dress, she climbed out the window and escaped The Wedding of the Year and the fiancé who lied to her. And she fell…
…straight into Luca De Rossi's arms! It must be fate. Luca has just two weeks to marry and meet the terms of his grandmother's will. The cutthroat businessman offers Athena one million pounds to become Mrs. De Rossi in name only, unless the allure of his new wife's purity proves too much for this cynical playboy to resist claiming their wedding night…
A Bride Worth Millions (The Howard Sisters #2) Reviews
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A Bride Worth Millions by Chantelle Shaw, Athena‘s story is the 2nd book in The Howard Sisters series but can be read as a standalone. The 1st book,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... is Lexi, Athena’s sister’s story.
I so much loved Athena’s book. It was such an emotional and passionate story and I adored the two mc’s…namely Athena and Luca de Rossi. There were some dark elements in the story, which added a lot of secrets and sad moments to the story – sexual abuse and Rett Syndrome, which I had never heard about and actually learnt a lot about it on Google.
Athena and Luca literally fall into each other’s arms, when she falls from a window whilst escaping from her wedding to marry the man she has just discovered is not in love with her, into Luca’s arms, who had been attending the wedding.
Two people who agree to a marriage of convenience that slowly grows into much more.
Athena and Luca were two characters that just pulled at my heartstrings from the very beginning. Both had been through so many heartache and pain in their lives and I adored the way the two were able to help each other in finding happiness in their lives together.
Luca was one of the heroes that totally grabbed me! The love and dedication he shows towards his daughter, the tenderness and thoughtfulness with Athena is astonishing. I felt so much for him.
I loved the chemistry between Athena and Luca….had a smile on my face when Athena climbs over one of the villa’s wall because she wants to know if Luca is keeping one or even two mistresses in secret!!!! Yet again, she falls into Luca’s waiting arms. Damn sweet!!!!
I would have given this book a 5 star rating…but I was beside myself with the epilogue!!!
This is one of those books that have to be read if you like a romantic and heartfelt love story. -
Note to self: this is the one where the designer hero has a sewing machine on his private plane and he alters the wedding gown she escaped in for their Las Vegas wedding.
This is a marriage of convenience story between the design house CEO hero and the nursery school teacher heroine who discovered her high society fiance in bed with another man hours before her wedding. The hero was at the wedding at the behest of his friend (and heroine's brother-in-law) who was worried about the heroine. Because the hero helped her escape and the press followed, the hero's marriage of convenience to a supermodel is off. So hero presses heroine to be his bride of convenience so he can keep the family villa where his disabled daughter has always lived.
That the H/h don't keep it platonic is inevitable, as is their love for each other.
I liked this hero and this heroine. I liked that the heroine got more and more confident as her marriage continued. It shows that this hero is good for her. Some readers didn't like the fact that the hero
Other info you might need to know:
Heroine was virgin. She had been sexually assaulted by a friend of her father's and was afraid of intimacy. I thought CS did a great job showing just how damaging such an experience, even though she wasn't raped.
Neither the lying fiance or the heroine's awful parents get their comeuppances, unfortunately. -
I enjoyed this one.
The tiny, but curvy virginal h just walked in on her fiancee in bed with, wait for it, not her BFF but HIS best friend. Turns out his willingness to wait for the wedding night wasn't as much of a chore as she thought it was. The h climbs out a window to escape the high profile wedding and falls into the H's arms. My kind of girl. Her parents never give her a chance to explain. Just the start of rotten relatives.
The H is in a pickle as well as his evil grandmother left a will requiring that he marry before his 35th birthday or else he loses everything. Everything being his position on the board of the company, his use of the family name for his fashion line because he is a bastard, and, most importantly, the estate villa that his fatally ill little girl lives in.
The tabloids get involved, and the H loses his fake fiancee for helping the h. He strong arms her into being the new fake fiancee/fake wife in exchange for a million pounds. Sweet girl that she is she used the money for an orphanage in India. Yes, of course.
Backstory for the h is she was sexually assaulted when she was a teenager by a tutor, but the H is kind enough, no really, to help her through it. Their overly sexualized lives proceed happily until the H realizes she may care for him more than she should and more than he should so he lets her free to find someone worthy. The h has had it with being overly accommodating and lays it on the line that she loves him. She's not weak or pathetic, and she beats feet once he says he can never...blah, blah, blah.
The H goes into a decline and hunts her down in India at the orphanage she helped redo with her new $$ windfall. HEA with adopted kids.
The H is quite a nice guy to the h overall. He gets angry with the h when he thinks she set them up after her wedding goes down the tubes, but figures sooner rather than later that what you see is what you get with her: sweet. His reluctance to accept good things is relatively believable with his back story of a bad mother, bad grandmother, and really bad mother to his daughter.
Issues: Her fricking rotten parents never get a good scolding which they need in spades, and the h's fiancee who set her up with betrayal never gets his. -
Heartbreaking passionate super emotional book. If it wasn't for the vasectomy thing I would have given it ten stars but the vasectomy thing ruined the book for me. I really wanted to see them with their own children.
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H's of future HPlandia books get the number of this H's Dr if you ever want a vasectomy, it seems he is the only Dr in HPlandia who can perform this surgery successfully!
Also just to nitpick the title she is worth exactly £1,000,000 not the plural.
I just was not as enamoured with this book as I was with her sisters story. This h is a wuss, the favoured biological daughter of her crappy parents she doesn't stand up for herself at all. She lets a family get away with sexually assaulting her, lets her parents call her stupid, does exactly what they want her to do include study for a career she has no interest in and fails at and marry a man who is using her as a beard for his affair with his best man. Also she is randomly clumsy but no doubt this will be magically cured once she loses her virginity.
The H comes across as shallow as a puddle. He is preparing to marry a goldigger to get his hands on the family home and business but actually he is doing it for his disabled daughter as its her home and comfort as she is terminally ill. He rescues the h from her doomed wedding then marries her after his mercenary fiancee kicks off. Of course there is insta attraction between the 2. He lusts after her bod and the h can overcome her man fears only with him. They get together then he creates angst because he can't have kids. (He carries the gene mutation which caused his daughters disease therefore he doesn't want any more biological kids) I can't help feel that if these 2 had spent less time in bed and sat down and had a conversation about their life goals the big, terrible misunderstanding at the end could have been avoided. Plus he has bags of cash and in these days of modern medicine there are plenty of other ways to have kids and they could have adopted (which they did anyway at the end) I'm sure there is a H in HPlandia who just chose to have lots of girls to get around his mutated genetics.
Did I mention he was a fashion designer and a whizz on a sewing machine? Do you think he could sew on all the scouting badges I need to put on my son's camp blanket?
All in all this one was slightly grittier than the usual fluff I like to find in HPlandia. The H's vasectomy didn't fail, his daughter is still going to die and the H and h from book 1 also had to worry over their firstborn ho was born with a hole in the heart. I need a bit more from my HEA sorry :( -
I wanted to love A Bride Worth Millions. It had tropes I like such as wealthy rakish hero and virgin heroine. And the prose was compelling.
Unfortunately it had a trope I hate so much it prevented me from finishing the book. That despised trope is the hero must marry or lose inheritance. It really annoyed me how dependent this hero was on his family business.
I expect an HP hero to be independtly wealthy and not dependent on the influences of family. Also the hero being a fashion designer, a turnoff. In fact I stopped reading when the hero picked up a scissor to alter the heroine's dress. It was just too much like a satirical riff on HP in my opinion.
Wish I could have finished this but a hated trope turned a potential keeper into a dnf -
לא התחברתי מההתחלה. לסיפור היה פוטנציאל מסויים, אבל הסיפור עצמו היה עמוס מידי בפרטים מיותרים ובאי סבירויות כמו העובדה שלוקה מחזיק במטוס הפרטי המפואר שלו מספרים ומכונת תפירה כך שיוכל לעצב שמלות בזמן טיסה. עוד דבר שפשוט נראה לי הזוי הוא שכשאתנה בורחת היא לוקחת איתה את התיק שהכינה לירח הדבש, אבל מסתבר שבתיק הזה אין בגד אחד לרפואה למעט בייבי דול ולכן במשך 3 ימים היא מסתובבת עם שימלת כלה ועם אותם הבגדים התחתוניים כך היא מקיפה את העולם למעשה.
גם החלק האחרון היה חפוז ובלתי ברור. טוב אני לא מצפה שזה יהיה שייקספיר, אבל בכל זאת קצת היגיון בשיגעון לא היה מזיק. -
Athena Howard finds out on her wedding day that her fiance in bed with his best man. She runs off from the wedding by jumping out of the windows and into the arms of Italian designer and playboy Luca De Rossi.
Luca needs to marry before his 35th birthday two week later to claim his inheritance. He proposes a year long marriage agreement to Athena in exchange of a million pounds. Athena needs the money to support the charity for orphan children so she agrees to marry Luca.
During weeks to come Luca and Athena start falling for each other and fall in love.
2.5 stars -
A million reasons to say "I do"
Athena Howard can't believe she did it. In an outrageously large wedding dress, she climbed out the window and escaped The Wedding of the Year and the fiancé who lied to her. And she fell…
…straight into Luca De Rossi's arms! It must be fate. Luca has just two weeks to marry and meet the terms of his grandmother's will. The cutthroat businessman offers Athena one million pounds to become Mrs. De Rossi in name only, unless the allure of his new wife's purity proves too much for this cynical playboy to resist claiming their wedding night -
Eh. The whole point of romance fiction is the fantasy and the miracle of love. I would have preferred that this couple while adopting still had miracle babies of their own. That wasn’t the case here. It ended with what I felt was a partial HEA.
Besides that, I absolutely LOATHED the FMC. She was some kind of special moron that seemed to just get lucky in her life. She was an idiot that not only was bullied and abused all her life but she couldn’t contain single intelligent thought in her head and the author writes a story where she miraculously becomes a new and improved woman all because she found confidence through s e x. Okay yes I’m over simplifying, but still that’s the jist.
I honestly thought the the FMC was going to get ripped off once she gave away her money and the MMC was going to have to fix it all for her, because the FMC came off as that stupid. But it didn’t which surprised me. Even still, this book didn’t end in a way that I found satisfactory. I was also mostly bored as I felt it dragged too much before this couple even got together. It was all fake kissing and withheld secrets from each other for like 75% of the book. Good luck. -
I enjoyed this and liked both leads well enough. I do wish het romance authors wouldn't bother to include any of us queers in their stories if we're only going to be used as villains.
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This book was an interesting one because it told a whole story with a wild ride. Athena has a past that stops her from advancing sexually and to make it worse, her fiance is gay! Discouraged and embarrassed, she literally falls into Luca's arms. Bound by a contract that threatens his ownership of his house and his position in his famous designer company, he proposes to Athena to marry him for $1,000,000. Athena only agrees because she's thinking about donating the money to her charity/orphanage.
Anyways, the only part I didn't like about the book was the fact that Luca can't have babies because he had a vasectomy. I wanted babies. They got adopted babies in the end but it's not the same in my heart because Luca was just plain afraid about being a biological father. He's scared that he's going to cause his child to have a rare genetic disorder like his first child. Yes, readers. He's already a father before he met Athena. -
Really 3.5 stars
Enjoyed the story -
received 4 stars @ RT Book Reviews
Miniseries:
The Howard Sisters -
received 4 stars @ RT Book Reviews
Miniseries:
The Howard Sisters -
It was an ok read but not what I really enjoy reading
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Unusually for a duet, this installment is as good as the first!
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I do not need to ever see a heroine call herself dumb that many times.
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I loved it!
