TITLE: The Billionaire’s Blackmailed Bride
AUTHOR: Jacqueline Baird
ISBN: 9781426817861
PUBLISHER: Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Rating: 
BOOK BLURB:
Marriage in haste, revenge at leisure! Anton Diaz is hell-bent on revenge; he’ll seduce and marry the innocent daughter of his enemy. To exact his plan will be no hardship, as Emily Fairfax is as beautiful as she is virginal. It’s only after that Emily realizes Anton is blackmailing her. Yet she can’t stop her body betraying her as they spend their days parted in anger and their nights locked in passion….
REVIEW:
Anton Diaz is very much an HP alpha male – he’s arrogant, rich, and bossy as hell. He’s also a little on the clueless side when it comes to his own (or anyone else’s) emotions and motivations. Emily is a pretty strong heroine, if only because she’s too darn stubborn to let go of her own hurt feelings to make some sort of compromise with her husband when things go sour. Of course, hubby doesn’t offer a compromise either, as such – just sort of pushes their differences aside and decides to go on as if nothing is wrong. But even that seems more positive than Emily’s constant focus on their troubles. Maybe I’m in a minority here, but I just think things could have resolved themselves much easier and sooner had she not been so bent on keeping the angst going.
Anton marries Emily with revenge in mind – revenge against a wrong her father allegedly did his family years before Emily was even born. After they marry, Anton decides that, while he doesn’t love his wife, that he does like her enough not to go on with his scheming. However, he lets the cat out of the bag during an argument and from then on Emily gives him the cold shoulder. He does make some nasty threats to her during this argument, but nothing he does or says for the rest of the book really reinforces any of those threats. He makes no move to take over her family’s company, nor does he tell her family about the secret he knows about her father. The two of them continue to angst and argue and have lots and lots of sex every chance they get. Meanwhile, Anton notices that his wife is emotionally absent from him – unlike how sweet and loving she was before his revenge scheme came up – so he just sort of goes along with it, trying to make the most of what they do have. Emily accuses him of cheating at almost every turn, but then she turns around and encourages him to cheat because she has this idea that if she can just catch him cheating then she can divorce him and take all his money. I don’t think either character acts terribly well at times. I suppose I felt more forgiving of Anton’s behavior than Emily’s because Anton seemed more willing to let bygones be bygones – even if he didn’t say it in so many words.
There were a number of things that were a tad aggravating about the book, namely the mega angst factor and Emily’s own ideas of revenge. I agree that she’d been terribly wronged, but I thought her holding onto her hurt for such a long time was the main cause of strife later in her marriage. I liked that we got a lot of the story from Anton’s POV – so many of these “bent on revenge” reads only tell the story from the heroine’s viewpoint, so you get a very biased idea of things, which always makes the confession of love at the end that much less believable. When that bit of the story does come around, though, Anton feels real remorse for his actions and apologizes without it sounding too much like a HEA maneuver.
I’d recommend this to anyone who likes an emotionally angsty read told from both the main characters’ POV’s
