LynneC’s review of The Real Rio D’Aquila (The Orsini Brothers, Book 6) by Sandra Marton
Contemporary Romance published by Harlequin Presents 15 Nov 11
This is the last book about the children of a Mafia don, who turn their backs on him and his ways and find their own way in life and to love. This series has been guilty pleasure after guilty pleasure, although I haven’t read them all.
This one is the last sister’s story. Isabella, or Izzy as her siblings call her, is a gardener, trying to make it to the big commissions. Her brother-in-law puts a big job her way, doing the landscaping for a house in the Hamptons, owned by a self-made billionaire (this is the Modern/Presents line, don’t forget!). She arrives late and disheveled, having crashed her car.
Rio D’Aquila started life as Matteo Rossi. He’d been brought up in an orphanage and worked his way to the top. He is annoyed when Izzy turns up and gives her his alter ego, Matteo. He’s been digging. Rio likes digging.
Most of the book is them having a wild weekend and then a wild week in his house in Mustique. The telling of the story is enjoyable, and if you let yourself get carried away by the read, then you’re in for a good time.
It’s only when you start to question that the story begins to crumble.
For instance, Isabella is born into wealth and she has fabulously wealthy siblings. So how come she doesn’t know about Mustique? It’s extremely exclusive, if a bit démodé these days, and buying a beach hut there is beyond the capabilities of a mere millionaire. You have to be seriously rich to live there. But she swallows the story of a caretaker having a house there. I could believe that said caretaker could pilot a small plane, if his quirky boss demanded it, but when we get to the Mustique bit, I had to suppress an eyeroll. She’s a professional gardener/landscaper, but she doesn’t talk like one. When she sees the garden, she says she’ll put “some” plants here and “some” plants there. She sounds like a small-scale amateur, not the kind who remodels estates.
At times, Isabella goes past sweet and naïve into stupid. To do her justice, she does realize she is getting in way past what she should. Going into an empty house with a total stranger on her own, however ripped that stranger happens to be, is little short of criminal.
And another question. Admittedly, I don’t know the Hamptons well (for that, read not at all) but in such an exclusive area, how likely are you to meet a run-down would-be rapist? (not Rio, but a walk-on character). Isabella shouldn’t be allowed out on her own, and my growing lack of sympathy for her makes some of her story a bit hard to take.
Rio is gorgeous, and he realizes early on that he has to come clean about who he is, but Isabella doesn’t let him. She wants to make love. I enjoyed his self-guilt and his crawling at the end, but I think Isabella should have done a bit of groveling herself. However, this isn’t the Modern/Presents way. He builds his fortune easily, gets accepted into all the right places, has sex with and then discards women, you know the score. I like a little more detail about my billionaires, maybe a bit more than the vague references to him buying and selling. For me, it adds to an authentic background and lets me buy into the story.
I also find it hard to believe that they could fall so deeply in love in a few days. In some romance novels I’ve gone along with the fantasy, but in reality it takes more than a few days. At one point Isabella realizes she doesn’t know Matteo at all, and I’d have been happier if they’d have not rushed into marrying.
And for reference, you can now get pregnancy kits that will tell you for sure two days after conception. And you don’t need a doctor to confirm it. If you’ve done a reliable over-the-counter test, repeated it, and it says you’re pregnant, then you are.
I’d skip the epilogue, all but the last paragraph, which is amusing. Wrapping the series up with a corny explanation of what the father was doing all this time isn’t really satisfactory. Not for me, anyway, so I prefer to believe that bit didn’t happen.
Grade: C-
Summary:
Italian by birth, this street urchin lived a life of extreme poverty until he escaped to Brazil—where he cast off his roots, took a new name and pulled himself up from the streets.
Now Rio D’Aquila is beyond wealthy, with a reputation for being uncompromising in business…and incomparable in bed! But on meeting vulnerable Isabella Orsini, he feels something deep within him stir, and he finds himself pretending to be that long-forgotten man.
Passion flares and their affair spirals, but Isabella still doesn’t know that her lover has lied to her. Who is the real Rio D’Aquila?
Read an excerpt.
Other books in this series:
