LynneC’s review of His Ring Is Not Enough by Maisey Yates
Contemporary Romance published by Harlequin Presents 20 Aug 13
Maisey Yates specializes in angsty heroes and heroines. In this one it’s the hero who is particularly conflicted, but while I enjoy reading angst, there are a few things about this book that didn’t really hold true for me.
Ajax is a hero with a very troubled past that includes drugs and girls. He has abstained from sex for all his adult life, and for him control is everything. Leah has been in love with Ajax for years, but he has passed her over in favor of her sister Rachel, who is, we are told, the more attractive of the two sisters.
Short of calling the hero Jacob, Yates couldn’t have made clearer her starting point for this book. The old Bible story tells how Jacob works for the father of the sisters Rachel and Leah for seven years, in order to earn the hand of Rachel in marriage, only to have Leah foisted on him at the altar. Then he has to work another seven years to get Rachel, the woman he really loves.
So in this story, Ajax works for Leah’s father, and then, after Rachel runs off with someone else, presumably the setup for another book, in order to gain control of the company, Ajax has to marry Leah.
Leah is twenty-three, but she is already the head of a million-dollar enterprise, Leah’s Lollies, a chain of upmarket candy stores. I didn’t really buy into Leah, and a lot of that is down to her age, but not all of it. Leah is not confident in herself, but at points in the story she puts her foot down and acts confidently. She is curvier than her sister, and while the dreaded three letter word that begins with F isn’t mentioned, she doesn’t have confidence in her figure. When she dresses for her wedding, she knows she’s got it wrong and chosen the wrong dress, but later, the book says she buys lots of clothes that she may never wear, like ball gowns. So why not use one of those? And when she dresses up for a ball, she is magnificent, wonderful and she achieves this by herself, hair, make-up and clothes. If she’s achieved head of her own independent company at twenty-three, then she would have to be much more assertive and confident than she makes out. She behaves badly with the press, and the one time we see her at work she behaves like a klutz and futzes up a window display. She would have made a lot more sense had she been older, nearer thirty than twenty and we could have seen her do more than eat her own products.
Ajax is another character I can’t quite buy. He’s in his early to mid thirties, and although he did a lot of things to make up for his early life, in fact, has turned himself into a saint, he still blames himself for everything. A martyr hero, whose constant refrain is that he isn’t good enough for Leah or anybody. His engagement to Rachel was okay because they weren’t really involved, and had never been to bed together. But on their wedding day, he tells Leah that he loves Rachel and breaks her heart yet again. I wouldn’t have forgiven as easily as Leah does, but in order to get the story moving, she has to make most of the advances to Ajax. I wanted to tell her that he isn’t worth it. Not because of what he’d been as a boy, but because of what he is now—a selfish, whining control freak who thinks the world revolves around him.
His background isn’t entirely convincing, either. It involves gangs and drugs, but when Yates discusses drugs, she is vague, as in “when I was on the drugs.” Nobody who has ever taken illegal drugs to any extent refers to them vaguely like that. They’re crackheads or junkies, and they have a drug of choice. The only drug mentioned by name is cocaine, and it is a passing reference to paying a prostitute with an ounce of cocaine. Wow. If you could get that for sex, then prostitution is a lot higher paid than I thought. Even drug lords might think twice about handing cocaine over by the ounce.
(In case you’re getting the wrong idea, I learned a lot of this when I was doing research for Brutally Beautiful and the rock star books, where two of my characters are ex-addicts. Not personal experience!)
When Ajax makes his big decision, he doesn’t mention any help agencies, just that he made up his mind. If he’d taken cocaine to any extent, then he was probably addicted, and it’s one of the hardest drugs to kick, by all accounts. Apart from that, Ajax wouldn’t have the moral compass to make the decisions he does for himself. I’m brushing past the fact that he then goes on to become a Harlequin Presents multi-gazillionaire, without, apparently, the education to carry him through it, only the mentorship of Leah’s father.
The plot is mostly that, about Leah and Ajax and their developing relationship or Leah’s struggles to break through Ajax’s hard exterior to the man beneath. For most of the book, this is a masochist/sadist relationship, with some very mild bondage (silk scarves) and so not my read. Leah takes all Ajax’s bullshit and comes back for more. It makes her unhappy, but she loves him. It also makes her an enabler. I’d have liked her to get a backbone much earlier in the book, but I’d also have liked Ajax to get some inkling of what he’s doing and show some signs of changing earlier, because this makes the book an awfully hard read for at least its first three-quarters.
There is one scene I find impossible to imagine in my head. I can’t believe an editor didn’t pick this up. Leah is wearing a bikini and cover-up. She agrees to sex with Ajax who ties her hands together and then proceeds to strip her, because we’re told later that she lies back on the bed naked. How do you remove a bikini top and cover-up with the hands tied together? I suppose the bikini could have been the bandeau kind and the cover-up a sarong, but there are sleeves involved. And no mention of scissors or tearing, so he doesn’t rip the garments off her.
“He moved his hands to the knot of her bikini top, and untied it in one deft motion before removing her bathing suit wrap, letting it fall to her waist, along with the top of her swimsuit.”
Okay, so everything is tangled around her waist. That means the bikini top has straps. That works, but pretty soon after she’s naked. It would take the skills of a stage magician to do that.
So while I love the idea of the book, I think it lacks in the execution. I’d love to see what Yates can do when she’s given full rein, without the restrictions that writing a category romance puts on her. She needs more freedom to explore the depths in the characters she writes, and a category romance isn’t really the right place to explore, because such a murky background can’t be described in realistic detail and it takes more than one time, one decision to completely change a character.
Grade: C-
Summary:
After “I do…”
Ajax Kouros had a plan. Being jilted at the altar? Not part of it—especially when facing a thousand guests and one hundred reporters. His company’s future depends on marrying a Holt, and when his bride’s sister steps up to the…altar, can he say no?
Leah Holt grew up watching her beautiful socialite sister hang on Ajax’s arm. Now she has the chance to stand in the spotlight and save her family’s fortune. But saying “I do” is only the beginning, and Leah soon realizes that the man she married is far more complex and distracting than the boy of her childhood fantasies….
Read an excerpt.
