A Forbidden Seduction by Sara Wood

Forbidden Seduction by Sara Wood

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars


This was kinda different.  The heroine gets fooled into a bogus marriage by a sociopathic Sicilian, and finds out from his brother that he was already married since he was nineteen.  It turns out his wife has been sabotaging Debbie and her mom's sandwich business to get revenge.  Debbie finds all this out from a coincidence when Luciano buys the bank where she delivers sandwiches through a service contract. 

I liked that Debbie really was a working class girl.  I can imagine her with an East Enders accent.  It was a matter of suspending belief that she truly had gotten fooled into a bogus marriage and it didn't come up.  I don't know how easy it is for a foreigner to get married in England when he's already married. I'm guessing you couldn't do that very easily in the United States using your real name.  I'll allow that this was possible for the purposes of the story.  I feel that Debbie got over being betrayed and made into an involuntary bigamist/adulteress too easily. 

I didn't quite get why Debbie was determined to go to the funeral in Sicily when she already knew her so-called husband was a lying sack of you know what, and she took her son. I felt that was extremely naive of her, despite being warned by Luciano.  She said she wanted to pay her respects.  I think that was just a plot device to get the story moved to Sicily.  The rest of the story is Debbie and Luciano owning up to their feelings, and that was sweet. Luciano is such a lovely guy. Considerate and caring, despite the great wrongs perpetrated against him. 

I think the best part of this book is that both leads are very likable and kind people who were taken advantage of by the dead bigamist husband and his family.  Their characters appealed to me. I think the melodrama about Luciano's Sicilian family is to be expected for a Harlequin Presents book, but I think that the resolution on their threat towards Debbie and her son Stefano was anticlimatic.  I would have liked a more dramatic on-screen confrontation, but maybe that's just the dramahound in me.

This is pretty good.  So, 3.5/5.0 stars.



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