4.5 Smooches!
Synopsis
Eighty seven billion dollars.
One dead New York business mogul.
No heirs.
No wives.
No relatives.
Eighty seven billion dollars.
Not hers yet.
He doesn’t deserve them.
He doesn’t know what to do with them.
She does.
She always has.
Eighty seven billion dollars.
He’s overwhelmed.
She’s prepared.
That will should have had her name.
Not his.
Eighty seven billion dollars.
His looks are a bonus.
Her looks are her weapon.
He’s fighting a losing battle against his heart.
He doesn’t know it yet.
Eighty seven billion dollars.
She gets everything she wants.
He’s what she wants.
Love has nothing to do with it.
To get to where you’re going, sometimes you need to step on a few people to get there.
Good thing her heels are sharp.
Review
When I read the blurb for this book, I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. It intrigued me, and being a voracious reader of the romance genre, I guess I was thinking that this would be a hard fought battle of the hearts. That the hero of this book would win over his heroine, in true romantic fashion, and off they’d go into the land of happily ever afters, albeit the insanely rich land of HEAs, but still.
“Everyone wanted Cedar Reynolds. Everyone wished they were her.”
Perfect. That one word sums up Cedar Reynolds with exquisite accuracy. Her finely honed persona was one crafted painstakingly by Cedar herself and designed to feed and maintain her image as the most feared, respected, envied and admired woman within New York City’s high society scene and beyond. This image was one that Cedar protected ruthlessly, exactingly. Controlling absolutely everything and everyone that even remotely touched her, her precisely managed life or her coveted professional standing, she was always planning and plotting her next move and several moves beyond. Everything, absolutely everything served a purpose. Every word she said, every expression on her face, every move she made was calculated to her advantage or to serve a future purpose. EVERYTHING.
“When you’re New York City’s reigning queen, you never walk around with a hair out of place, with a nail chipped, or God forbid, in last season’s clothing.”
Cedar Reynolds was orphaned at the tender age of 18, losing her parents, darlings of the New York City societal pages, in a most horrific way, leaving her to be taken in by a close family friend, multi-billionaire, Harold Feingold. It was Harold who groomed Cedar into the strong, confident and precise woman she was today. Acting as her mentor, Cedar was the closest thing to a confidante that the elusive billionaire had, but even she did not know all of his secrets.
“He was perfect. Absolutely perfect.”
Ellis Carrington was orphaned at the age of 5 and the product of the foster care system. Having just completed grad school with his master’s degree two weeks prior to the death of Harold Feingold, he was taken completely by surprise when Mr. Feingold’s attorney pays him an unannounced visit two days after the funeral and delivers some life altering news. Thus begins Ellis’ plunge into the spotlight, into unimaginable wealth, into a life he never dreamed of because it was so unfathomable.
As the heir to Feingold’s empire and as his protégé and quasi-confidante, Ellis and Cedar are thrust together. Cedar sees Ellis’ discomfort, his struggle to find his place, and offers to help him. She proposes mentoring sessions, a crash course on the rich and famous lifestyle, so to speak, and Ellis, completely smitten with and dazzled by Cedar, as well as in desperate need of a friend he can trust just as much as he is in need of the guidance she offers, gratefully accepts her offer.
And so begins the whirlwind romance of Ellis Carrington and Cedar Reynolds…
“Everything was calculated. Everything was always calculated.”
Through most of this book, I felt as if I was reading the New York high society version of Mean Girls. This is a dark, twisted, off-the-charts mind-fuck of a tale that absolutely left me wanting a more. The author delivered a devious, wicked, evil story and she did it brilliantly. It left me scratching my head; it left me questioning everything that I had just read; and it left me sitting there with my mouth gaping open and an audible “What the hell?!” bursting from it.
This isn’t a story that you enjoy, this is one that you experience, and that experience for me is definitely worth the 4.5 smooches I’m giving it.
~ Danielle Palumbo
