Comadrin's Topics (139)

"She, pure as the driven snow. He, dipped his wick in everything in a skirt, with a kept woman whom he kicks to the curb like last week's garbage." Doesn't anyone other than me get kind of tired of this? Up until his unlikely epiphany, he's a misogynistic jerk who thinks of women as a life support system for a vagina, certainly not as humans. From his comments before and after getting punched, I got the impression that he believes there are only two types of women: Sluts (the pretty ones) and involuntarily celibate (the not pretty ones). He's horribly insulted that she called him a hypocrite, even though he's an entitled rich punk who thinks he deserves the adoration of all women. About the nicest thing I can say of him is that he isn't a rapist. Slimeball is the kindest epithet I can come up with.

It wasn't too bad of a story, but GEEEZ he was dumb! I did appreciate that he stopped being an enabler for the serial adulterer who had saved his life.

Definitely one of the better Harlequin manga. Both the ML and the FL were decent people, and fleshed out characters instead of one dimensional stereotypes. The ML realized what his wife had gone through, and didn't demand anything of her. He treated her with respect and empathy throughout the story. His redemption and happiness was deserved, unlike that of so many Harlequin characters.

I'm so grateful to my parents that we were poor when I was a child. When I was a brat, my parents had education, class, culture, and not enough money to buy the clank out of an old fender. We lived in a rather poor, multi-cultural neighborhood in Berkeley, California, and later moved to a suburban neighborhood in a smaller town in California. My sister and I grew up as kind of hybrids: The rich kids we were somewhat jealous of (some of them actually had swimming pools IN THEIR OWN BACK YARD) looked down on us because we lived in a semi-slum neighborhood, but were somewhat intimidated at the same time due to the education level of our parents and the fact that we had more books in the house than the local library. Our neighbors, for the most part, didn't quite understand us well, but we mostly got along with them, except for the types who hated anyone who used words with more than one syllable. They never quite understood why the folks had discussions about books, politics, and ethics with their children around the dinner table.

One thing our parents and this life taught us was to never make judgments on people because of where they came from or who their parents were. If my parents had been on the upper middle class socio-economic scale all my life, I could have ended up being the kind of person who spends his time despising the 47% (from a presidential campaign about a decade ago) who lived debauched lives on the back of honest taxpayers. Thankfully, I can remember wearing worn out clothes and shoes and know that there are desperate single mothers out there doing their damnedest to feed their children.

Then we have jerk boy...I mean Angus. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He's not a toxic macho rapist type, but he's pretty entitled. When his car hit Lisa, he wasn't the Marquis d'Evremonde throwing money out and questioning why the poor cannot keep their children out from under his horses hooves, but his charity is patronizing and pretty much sets up Lisa's hackles. His determination to bring her along on his vacation is decent, but seems like it has a great deal to do with his sexual attraction toward her, something that would definitely have taken a different tack if she had been of higher social status. On the cruise, he seduces her and is somewhat shocked that she is repulsed by his intention of coming to see her at his convenience for sex. He only comes back into her life when the femme fatale brings her pregnancy to his attention and claims Lisa did it on purpose to blackmail him. He believes it, hook, line, and sinker, and shows up furious. When he realizes that she didn't do that, he is willing to marry her, TO GAIN POSSESSION OF HIS CHILD. He cannot really bend his narrow little mind around the fact that taking HIS/not their child away from her would be devastating to her. After all, she's demi-monde, not beau-monde like him.

I saw this exact thing in the US Military years ago. I was an enlisted Marine who became an officer. At the officer Basic School, where mustangs (former enlisted officers) were outnumbered about 15 to 1, there was an unwritten rule or instruction that was very pervasive. It was, basically, that you could never completely trust an enlisted person. I hated that mindset, which followed me for years and prejudiced my career, as I wasn't a "real" officer since I had been enlisted.

This is the same thing that Lisa is up against. She isn't the "true metal," and therefore her emotions, beliefs, and morals can be judged by a completely different standard from those "born to the purple," no matter how stupid this is and how obvious it is an egregiously false standard.

If you want to read a really unpleasant expose of this, try Georgette Heyer's "Barren Corn." I had to shower after reading it, and wanted to go to combat so I wouldn't have to think about things like that.

The only other explanation of her falling in love with him would be that she had completely and utterly lost her mind, in which case she would be wearing an aluminum foil hat to keep Kurt Cobain's ghost from stealing her brain.

The ML is a rapist, a blackmailer, and an entitled f***wad. He pretty much admits to these charges while smirking about how clever he is to get away with it all. Once he has her in his physical control; living in his apartment in a foreign country, he blows hot and cold on her, keeping her always guessing and pretty much controlling her every movement and decision, including that she will be sleeping in his bed. This is straight out of Psychological Warfare 101 in the KGB/CIA handbook for seducing and recruiting agents to betray their country, in this case to betray her principles and herself. As a side note, he has never used protection nor has he talked to her about it (not much talking with rape, as her only communications were "no"). All of this is classic Stockholm Syndrome preparation of the victim.

Then we have the denouements of his past. In the first one, his father only loved business and his mother was Roman Catholic and they took away his doggie. Uhh..OK? The second one, after he chased her down, was that he had divorced his first wife because she didn't want kids and a family, which he did. Then he met Talia, and fell in love with her immediately. Being afraid of losing her, he raped her, blackmailed her, gaslighted her, and treated her like trash. All of which explanations make perfect sense, ONLY IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE ALL WOMEN ONLY DESIRE TO BE ETERNALLY TORTURED!!!!!!!!!

My conclusion: This has to be the most god-awful excuse for a romance story I have ever come across. The ML is human filth beyond belief, and the ending would be hilarious if it wasn't so disgusting. It is as romantic as a snuff film.

He sees a girl in a tree in broad daylight. A normal person says, "Excuse me, but who are you?" Dominic almost calls for a SWAT team complete with snipers. His fiancée disappears on vacation and is presumed dead. He goes to FL and practically accuses her of kidnaping and murder. He invites her to dinner for the sole purpose of getting drunk and yelling. He "needs" to have sex with her, and then kicks her out in the morning. After avoiding her for six weeks, she tells him she's pregnant. He looks like he's having an orgasm and starts rebuilding her house into Buckingham Palace. He gets pushy to the point of being stifling. My conclusion about Dominic: He's stopped taking his meds!

I have to agree with Anni. Alex needs an attitude adjustment, and the best way to do it would be an electric cattle prod, and I'll leave it to your imagination as to where it should be applied.

Sorry to all the people who just love the ML because he isn't a testosterone spewing sexual assaulting Neanderthal. He is always smirking at her, and trying to manipulate her. For some reason, people like him always make me think that they should be poster boys for The World's Most Punchable Face Society. That prissy "I've got something on you" attitude could easily make me feel like going postal.

What the hell happened to the snake? And how the hell did a hooded cobra end up in South Australia (after all, they have both types of Taipan, which are even more poisonous)? I feel that, whether it was really there or if it was only an hallucination, it should have been explained to the reader.

One can always count on Ms. Neels for a wholesome story. The characters were pretty nice too. She can have some rather stupid ML's, but you'll never see a sexual harasser/ predator among them.