I'll take a giant helping of douchebaggery...

with a dollop of "Italian" machismo.

Hold the condom, please!

My reading mood has been capricious lately. Terribly so. One moment, I'm interested in a really meaty historical, the next I'm thinking of going for a Romantic Suspense, then I'm like maybe a light contemporary, then two hours later...well you get the idea. When I find myself suffering from a short attention span, I often find that reading a harlequin or a e-book hits the spot. Even if it's mediocre, there is often entertainment value to be had, for good or for ill, and it gets the reading mojo going again. Since Lucy Monroe has served me well in the past, I picked up her HP Pregnancy of Passion (Miniseries: Expecting! She's sexy, successful and pregnant!).

This was a rough go at first. I wasn't sure if I'd make it. We have Elisa, the illegitimate daughter of an American actress and a Sicilian businessman, who now lives in Italy and works as a jeweller. A year ago, she entered into an intense affair with her father's friend, Salvatore di Vitale, a security expert. It ended badly when she became pregnant and he rejected her, sure that the child was not his. Depressed and alone Elisa miscarries. Now having made the attempt to go on with her life, poor Elisa is in for an unhappy surprise, when Salvatore shows up at the behest of her papa, who fears that she is in danger (for reasons that aren't all that interesting, so I won't get into it).

Salvatore has been suffering from a bad case of Sicilian guilt and fears he caused Elisa's miscarriage. His solution: to marry her, of course. Even though Salvatore still believes she's a slut,'cuz her papa told him so. The man who saw her only during summers while she was growing up. But a Sicilian man must take the word of another Sicilian man, after all. And she turns him on so much, she must be a dirty whore. But he'll marry her, because he hurt her and he feels bad. Kill me now. I was hating this guy so much, I was blaming him for the damn miscarriage. It gets worse as the depth of his douchebaggery is revealed, because of course Pops wasn't calling his daughter a ho. Anyone with half a brain cell might've asked for clarification, rather than jumping to a nasty conclusion. And it turns out he made another bonehead move, which had me shaking my fist.

Our heroine Elisa is very unhappy with Salvatore's reappearance, but she still loves him, so she drops her drawers. And he takes the opportunity to try to knock her up again. I know, I know, sounds awful, but the book actually got better as it went along. Monroe does a very good job at showing that Salvatore is indeed, a dumb shit. She explains his reasoning without excusing it. Chalk it up to Sicilian this or that, it was a smokescreen to protect his feelings, and he effed up big time. Salvatore definitely shows geniune remorse as he realizes what a fucktard he was. And Elisa makes him suffer. But not enough for me. Although a good job was done explaining his actions, the hero was still too much of an asshole for me to really get behind the HEA. I will give it a C+ though, because at least I was able to understand Salvatore a bit by the end.