This is the second instalment of “The Boarding School” Series. The book follows an English Duke, Harrison and this blonde woman Sierra. So the story opens with S’s engagement party with a guy called Ethan, whom she is marrying coz her parents like him. She doesn’t even like him for God’s sake. (Is this set in India? I ask coz many marriages still happen here with no contribution of either the groom or bride. And that is just a sad state of affairs).
Now in this party, S meets H and they kiss each other. S beats herself up about kissing someone else than her fiancé and comes to the revelation that she is gonna break off the marriage. But life strikes… Her father is arrested for embezzling and her mother commits suicide because she can’t handle the pressure and the loss of honor. She shoulders the whole burden of her fall from grace and has to handle her younger angry bratty brother.
H being a nice person offers S a job in the stables of her house which now he has bought. N so 3 years pass. Her brother Daniel is still being a pain-in-the-ass. And in a bid to restore the family money, Daniel steals from H’s house. And is caught on CCTV. Stupid shit. Haven’t you seen any heist movies at all?
This video footage comes in very handy for H. As there is an inheritance clause he blackmails S to marry him and have his baby in the duration of a year. Obviously, that happens and they have sex, S falls in love with H… etc... Till a happy ending...
I like this book better than the previous one. There was no sign of Daniel after S & H got married. This lead man was better than D. Loads better… It’s a time-pass read at best. Elizabeth Lennox Epic vintage romance
One of my favorites from this author. There were a few bumpy parts, like whatever happened to the brother? He just melts away in the story and there’s no resolution to what happened with him.
However everything else was swoon. Dominant alpha hero who maneuvers the heroine into marriage. Steamy sex scenes with NO condoms, a virgin heroine who hasn’t spread her legs for other men and belongs only to the hero.
Perfect. I wish this writers books were always this good.
No cheating or abuse. HEA but no epilogue. Elizabeth Lennox The Duke's Blackmailed Bride
They met at her engagement party. The next day her father was arrested for alleged fraud and embezzlement. Her mother committed suicide. Her father died in jail and her and her brother were left homeless. Now three years later he is there with a proposition for her. She married and gives him an heir and her brother won't go to jail. This is some wicked stuff happening to her. Will she ever get justice for her family? What about the Duke? Is he wanting her for more than her ability to procreate? Elizabeth Lennox The writing needs a lot of tightening up, but the stories/characters are really fun. Enjoyed this one. Elizabeth Lennox A vast improvement on this 2nd installment of the Boarding School series!
I really enjoyed this book much more than I did the first one. To start off our leading man Harrison was much more likeable and gorgeous to boot with black hair and blue eyes, tall and muscular he was every girls dream man. From the moment he meets our leading lady Sierra he's smitten and captivated by her and after tragedy strikes her life he tries to win her over but is avoided by her and after an apportunity presents itself he takes a very nasty route to finally make her his. But even though the actions he's taken and what he demands from her are less than chivalrous you can see straight away that's not the only thing he wants from her and that he cares for her deeply treating her well, with respect and affection. Sierra starts off a bit clueless just going through the motions of her life and not having much of a personality and just going along with what other people wanted. After her life takes a major nose dive it was nice to see her wake up to what she wanted out of life, to become such a strong woman and deal with everything that had happened in her life with her head held high, a very sweet, courageous and loving woman. And the sexual encounters were vastly improved in this book, the scenes were better described and flowed better making their passion much more believable and HOT too! My only pet peeve about this book would be that our leading lady was a virgin which in this day and age would be very unlikely given that she was 23 years old at the time, in the first book Sasha was a virgin too and I really don't see the nessesity for this to make a romance believable yet the men are basically man-whores and that is acceptable! Overall this book was full of drama, action, suspense and love making it quite an entertaining read and very enjoyable. Elizabeth Lennox
Download The Dukes Blackmailed Bride (The Boarding School, #2)
Sierra couldn’t catch a break! Every time she thought she’d gotten her life back on track, something happened to cause it to come crashing down around her. She’d paid for her father’s arrest, her mother’s death and now…now she would pay for her brother’s crimes! Marriage to Harrison Aimsworth, Duke of Selton? He was the man who knew all of her secrets! And now he was demanding that she provide him with an heir? What more could go wrong with her world?
Harrison had to marry and produce an heir or he’d lose his title. And he had a very short period of time in which to accomplish that miracle. Unfortunately, the only woman who had ever affected him wouldn’t give him the time of day…until he discovered her brother stealing priceless artifacts out of his home. Now he could manipulate the situation to his benefit. The woman who had evaded him for so many years would finally be his! The Dukes Blackmailed Bride (The Boarding School, #2)
Lennox's second real book in this series. This was a tad better than the first one - atleast the guy wasn't a complete manwhore although it was alluded to that he had many many mistresses. The characters are one dimensional and Lennox seems to use the same adjectives over and over again: words like little and lovely for the women and words like arrogant obnoxious and disgusting for the men. Also, serious minus points for writing about cliche gender roles.
1. These women have terrible names - Sasha, Sierra... let's just get into the exotic vibe right away!
2. These women are inexperienced, vulnerable virgins
3. The men are super successful and controlling, and somehow completely taken by their one woman.
The sex isn't all that great either. Elizabeth Lennox I enjoyed this more then the first book but where's Daniel???? I mean really he just goes away and so she just leaves him. That is just odd!!! But other then that I liked the book 3 1/2 stars. Elizabeth Lennox Review to come but I really enjoyed this short novel. Elizabeth Lennox Pretty blonde Sierra is just vomiting epiphanies all over her engagement party. Turns out, she’s just noticed that fiancé Ethan is a jerk. He drinks too much and laughs too loud with his buddies, and he calls her Princess in a very sarcastic tone. Why did Sierra ever agree to marry him? Did she actually agree? Does she even like him?
She doesn’t want to be like her mother, that’s for sure. Her mother drinks and plays mean girl power games with all the other rich upper class wives of their set. Sierra thinks maybe she wants to be a vet. She likes horses and, vaguely, other animals.
Then she catches sight of Harrison. He’s a duke (which isn’t important to her) and he’s so pretty. After a quick chat, they snog. Then Harrison says something Sierra takes as slut shaming for snogging a guy she just met at her engagement party, which she thinks is rude, but then she slut shames herself and runs off into the night.
Everything moves pretty quickly from that moment: Sierra’s father is arrested for embezzling from Duke Harrison, her mother commits suicide, her father has a heart attack and dies in prison, and fiancé Ethan dumps her and demands the return of the ugly diamond he gave her.
Three years later, Sierra is working as Harrison’s stable girl and studying part time to be a vet. Harrison has bought Sierra’s family’s palatial family home, and she rents a small cottage nearby. She lives there with her resentful brother Daniel, who insists that their father wasn’t a crook, and that their stuff should be their stuff. It’s causing a lot of tension, because Sierra is too nice to tell her brother to act like a 19 year old, not like a spoiled whiny brat.
Sierra has managed to avoid Harrison for three years. My opinion of Harrison’s alpha cred is very low. At any stage he could have said ‘have the stable girl washed and waxed and brought to my chambers’ and his minions would have carried out his orders. They may have originally worked for Sierra’s family, but they seem totally into Harrison, and would probably think his taking even a clearly smutty interest in Sierra was just adorable.
Daniel hits on a fool proof way of restoring the family finances: he’ll sneak into their old house and steal back their things! Nothing can go wrong with this plan! Except Sierra is not into it, and tells him to put them all back. Rather miffed, Daniel takes off. Daniel is then completely missing from the rest of the book. Sierra occasionally wonders why Daniel is not responding to her texts, other than to tell her he’s off with a bro. I found out later that Daniel has his own short story bundled with another book in this series, so maybe his adventures are later explained. Probably not. I didn’t really care, because Daniel’s crimes are background noise. They are only there for Harrison to put to use to blackmail Sierra into marrying him.
This book is the second in a series about a bunch of rich friends who were at English boarding school together. They run the gamut of classic Mills & Boon heroes: there’s a Greek magnate guy, this English noble guy, a Russian oligarch guy, a sheikh, and some American dude. While I would usually say that any series dealing with an individual hero hook-up each book can be read as a stand-alone, the plot of this one won’t make much sense without reading the first book about the Greek guy. In that, the friends all gather around the sick bed of their mentor and former headmaster, Uncle Charles. He tells each of them to sort their love lives out. Harrison has to sort out his inheritance thing with marriage. If he doesn’t get married and produce an heir within the next 18 months, his yucky Dutch cousin will inherit the ducal title and all the ducal properties.
I can tell you, from my extensive reading of entailments (i.e. I glanced over a Wikipedia entry a few months ago when I was reading a Sara Craven book to work out why entails still seem to work like they do in Pride and Prejudice) that this inheritance thing is at least half bogus. Titles still entail. The previous Duke could have disposed of the associated properties as he saw fit, so he could have been this level of jerk about it. But not the title. That’s Harrison’s until he dies. Harrison isn’t particularly fussed about the properties; he pays tax on them and leaves them to crumble. He’s got his own big bucks. However, this is all a perfect way to get the stable girl washed and waxed and sent to his chambers, with the added bonus of a wedding ring and a baby.
Sierra goes along with it all, and starts two new projects: being sad that Harrison doesn’t love her as much as she loves him, and clearing her father’s name.
I really do like this plot, and the book is amusing and silly, but I can’t pretend that this is very competently handled. I’ve given the problematic inheritance plot as an example of where the internal logic goes awry, but there are a lot more. There are a lot of books out there that do this plot with more style, and with more crazy fun, so I can’t really recommend this one.
Elizabeth Lennox good Elizabeth Lennox