Hot Summer Bride, Sandra Marton

A billionaire is left custody of his niece when his sister died. He hires a beautiful and rich pampered heiress as a nanny. The girls falls in love with the baby and the tycoon. She ends up marrying him to protect the child from going to foster care or to be brought up by an opportunistic money-grabbing grandmother. But they fall in love, etc.

I'm a great fan of Sandra Marton. I loved her Prince's series, and I bought this book because I thought I would enjoy it as much as I did the others. But I was very disappointed. The plot is good, but the way the story is told is a bit ... mechanical. I think she just applied some writing techniques and did not put her heart into it. At the end of the story, I still did not know the characters, I hadn't warmed up to them, and I was not even sure they loved each other. No emotion, not enough interactions between the hero and the heroine, Cold. Cold. Cold. Some little inconsistencies did not arrange things. Earlier in the story the girl says she would like to have a marriage based on love. A few pages later, she says she is not the marrying kind. She is also pictured as very meek; she was not as fiery as you would have expected from an independent heiress. And all through the story, the hero and his lawyer behave towards the heroine like she is some money-hungry woman, when in fact she is a rich and proud heiress. It just didn't add up.

I know Sandra Marton is working on a sheikh series now, and I hope they are going to be incredibly beautiful stories just like her last series (The Italian prince's pregnant bride, The Greek prince's chosen wife, The Spanish prince's virgin bride). No, I don't merely hope. I'm confident she will produce wonderful stories like before. She is too good a writer not to.

The Italian billionaire's secret love-child, Cathy Williams

Charlie is eighteen and madly in love with her summer fling, whom she thinks is struggling woker with no money. Riccardo is twenty-six, super-rich, and thinks he is having a fling with a mature twenty-four years old woman who, just like him, wants to have some fun, no strings attached. The "fling" ends dramatically when each one discovers the truth - or should I say the lies- about each other. But their passion was not without consequences...

Eight years later, they bump into each other, and the passion is still there. She is wary of him. What will he do if he discovers they had child together? And even though she still dreams of him at night, nobody wants to get burned twice in a relationship with no future. But the more she avoids him, the more he pursues her. Soon he learns that he is a father. And he will do whatever is necessary to be a full-time father... with the most satisfying bonus of bedding Charlie.

The plot is good, but the story lacks passion. Riccardo is a bit weak for an alpha male. Charlie lacks the fire that makes great heroines. Really, the beginning is very good. But by chapter two, it is pretty boring. Even their daughter was not a great character. She could have played a more important role. I was very disappointed by the story.