These Royals will ruin you…
Blimey. This trilogy has absolutely knocked my socks off. I guess I must really been in the mood for a trashy romance/soap opera read and this has really hit the target.
The story so far ...
Ella, an orphan who started her career as a stripper at fifteen years old, has been rescued from a life of having dollar bills tucked into her g-string nightly by the best friend of the father she never met, who recently died in a handgliding accident. This guy, who happens to be a billionaire, has five insanely-hot, over-sexed sons who attend a prep school that makes Dante’s Second Circle of Hell sound like an OAP’s garden party. And guess where Ella’s going to school? Despite a rocky start, Ella strikes up a love affair with one of the five sons, Reed, (despite the other sons referring to Ella as their sister, which is kinda icky when you think about it) much to the annoyance of the Pretty Mean Girls at school and his dad’s girlfriend and Ella walks in to find her new beau in bed with the dad’s girlfriend. Ella runs away, so the guys all have to track her down across country and drag her kicking and screaming back home. Throw in blackmail, pregnancy scares and a whole bunch of rich-kid angst and in the cliffhangeriest ending I’ve ever read, Reed gets arrested for murder and Ella’s bio dad, Steve, literally comes back from the dead.
Did I miss anything?
I shouldn’t like these books as much as I did, but damn. It was like they were made of crack, or something.
Ella and Reed have virtually nothing in common, other than intense physical attraction. They have no conversations worth mentioning, and he’s a complete alpha male, and yet I found myself really rooting for them. The plot is like something the Hollyoaks writing team chucked in the bin for being too implausible and yet I couldn’t stop turning the pages.
The roller-coaster melodrama follows Ella and Reed as they try to get Reed’s arrest for the murder of Brooke overturned. At the same time, Ella is uprooted from the Royal mansion to go and live with Steve, her bio dad, and his Charmsville wife, Dinah. Steve turns out to be kind of a wanker, but Ella feels compelled to give her relationship with him a go, what with him being her only living relative and all that. Dinah is just as delightful as she was in the first two books, but we also get to see a bit more of her character and understand her a bit better.
The identity of the real murderer kept me guessing right to the end and in true Royal style everything gets revealed with a huge bang.
This has been such a fun trilogy - I’d totally recommend it.
5 stars