If Harvey Weinstein is your idea of a romantic hero, you'll probably enjoy this more than I did.

Bastien Zikos is still smarting two years after Lilah Moore refused to sleep with him. So when her father's company goes bust, he swoops in to buy it - but only on the proviso that Lilah become his "mistress". If she says no, he'll sell out and her father and all the workers have no jobs. If she says yes, everybody gets their jobs back. It was just so, so odious. The blackmailed-into-sex trope is my least favourite trope in the "Modern" line, and this was a particularly disgusting, nauseating embodiment of it.

What Bastien is doing - making Lilah have sex with him so that she and many others can keep their jobs, is no different to what Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer et al have been rightly excoriated for. It's just....horrific! How could any woman find this romantic? All the sexual interludes that occur once Lilah has agreed to the blackmail reeked more of rape than love making. Sure, it's intimated that Lilah has intense feelings for Bastien, but this sort of uneven power dynamic cast an appalling, uneasy shadow over the proceedings. Her feelings aside, was Lilah ever really consenting?

I'm kind of appalled at myself that I gave this 2 stars, but I did like Lilah. She was not the wet rag that the heroines in this line often tend to be, nor is she overly melodramatic (I read [b:The Sinful Art Of Revenge|17611746|The Sinful Art Of Revenge|Maya Blake|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1363243156l/17611746._SY75_.jpg|21933881] before this and the heroine did my head in with the overwrought way she handled everything.) I felt bad for her being stuck in a situation where she was effectively being repeatedly raped by the man she had feelings for.

I understand this came out in 2015, a couple of years before #metoo exploded, and I also get the fantasy of not having to work hard for a rich billionaire to be obsessed with you and win you at all costs. But the hero exchanging sex with the heroine with the threat that countless others, her father among them, will lose their jobs....just yuck, yuck, yuck. Bastien is a toad who belongs in jail.

I just didnt feel any passion between them. Although its a nice romance. It isnt special. She isn't that sassy. If you want sassy I can introduce you to my sister in law. That was merely human.

I didn't mind him. Although he is a little bit of a jerk, I didn't dislike him but I don't believe he is in love with her.

Enjoyable but not extremely memorable for me. Despite the blackmail angle there was not much angst.