Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Love: ❤️❤️❤️

Dark: 😈

Humour: 😂

Fluff: ☁️

Predictability: 🎱🎱🎱🎱🎱

Spice quantity: 🌶️🌶️.5

Spice quality: 🥵🥵.5

*WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD*

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Mafia smut is one of my favourite genres, especially with an arranged marriage trope, so I have high hopes for this one. 

It starts out well, the storyline has me hooked within a few pages. However I was a bit confused when 25 pages in Mckayla asks who Savio is, despite being in a meeting together with his father only pages before. 

So, it turns out that Savio is already, unknown to him until now, betrothed to another woman. The daughter of another mafia boss. He isn’t happy when he learns about this. Although Savio is supposedly the boss, it seems his father is still the one pulling the strings.

Savio has clearly started to form an attachment to Mckayla already, although the same can’t be said for her. After she repeatedly tries to escape Savio tells her she must marry him to solve both of their issues. She doesn’t realise that he is doing this, at least in part, to keep her alive.

She obviously resists and inadvertently outs his plan to his father and his fiancée. Surprisingly, his father seems to go along with it but Viviana (the fiancée) is livid. Over the following weeks it becomes clear that they have had a sexual relationship in the past and that while Savio has no feelings for her, she is actually in love with him. This makes her a very dangerous woman. 

There are some definite continuity errors in the story. When Mckayla gets her phone back and speaks to her mother, it seems that she has no idea what is happening but chapters before she had spoken to her father on the phone and they had supposedly had dinner together planned at least two days prior to this. This happens repeatedly through the book. 

Finally at 30% the sexual tension starts to build, only a small kiss happening before this point.

Mckayla’s parents turn up seemingly out of nowhere and they witness an altercation between Savio and another mob boss, not the best way to meet the parents. Mckayla appears to have done a 180 and tells her parents that she trusts Savio 100% 

Side-note: my brain can’t stop calling Gennaro Geronimo instead (with all the gusto of a paratrooper jumping from a plane).

Well, that was a short build up. The ‘action’ begins at 39%. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about that but the shift in Mckayla’s attitude seems to have happened very quickly and without much basis on her part. 

It’s making me giggle a bit every time they reference ’the beast coming out’. All I can think of is Viserys from GOT and it’s just as cringe now as it was then. 

The characters are so fickle, it seems to be like this most of the way through. One second Mckayla is musing about how she is happily married to Savio the next she is hoping to get him put in jail. At 72% I can’t say I like either character very much. 

Nothing much comes of any of the storylines. There is a kidnapping but it’s resolved off page, Viviana is resolved most off page and the conflict with the parents just disappears.

Overall I’m a little disappointed. The dialogue confusing in places and hard to follow and some of the scenes seem to cut short abruptly. The characters do things that don’t seem to match up to their personalities often and much of the storyline takes place of page. The idea for the storyline is great but the execution wasn’t. 

#Hea #mafia #billionaire #vanilla #forcedmarriage 

F(r)anny G