Lush Money by Angelina M. Lopez

Narrated by Scarlette Hayes

Lush Money is a kind of gender-flipped Harlequin Presents with a billionaire heroine being the jerky alphahole instead of the usual HP alphahole male. I didn’t appreciate this when I requested the book for review.  Had I known I may not have done so because HPs are not my favourite – I have a low tolerance for alphaholes.

Roxanne Medina, CEO of Medina Now Enterprises, based in San Francisco, is a (somewhat improbably) 29-year-old self-made billionaire and very much a control freak. She doesn’t trust people and doesn’t appear to have any close friends. She is an only child, doesn’t know her father and is not close to her mother. Roxanne’s business is built around building up female-owned businesses so it was curious to me that she seemed so friendless. She comes across as very cold but her business and ambition seem to have more heart behind it than that.

In any event, Roxanne has decided she wants a child and, not wanting said child to grow up without knowing their father, has determined she wants to get pregnant the old-fashioned way – but with a billionaire twist.

29-year-old Mateo Ferdinand Juan Carlos de Esperanza y Santos is the “golden prince” and heir to the throne of the fictional Monte del Vino Real in north-western Spain. His parents are not-nice people. His father in particular is a real piece of work. He’s a cheating cheatypants and extremely bad with money. Mateo is all the things his father is not and is very concerned about his country which is being run into the ground by his parents’ spendthrift ways. He is a scientist and vintner and has developed a new grapevine which in about three years will, hopefully, save his country. In the meantime, he’s trying hard to put off creditors and keep things okay at home. He is mostly based in San Francisco, working out of the UC Davis campus.

Mateo’s father, King Felipe, has made a deal for Roxanne and Mateo to marry. They will be married for one year and will have 3 nights together every month (when Roxanne is most fertile) in order to get her pregnant. They will then divorce and share custody (I was a little vague on exactly how this was supposed to work) of the child. In return Roxanne will pay off Monte del Vino Real’s debts. Of course, Mateo has to agree to this and he’s not at all keen at first. However, very reluctantly, he does agree because reasons. He then has second, third and fifty-fourth thoughts because Roxanne is difficult to know and, initially, difficult to like. I felt the same way as Mateo.

Mateo is wonderful. He’s gorgeous (of course), clever, faithful, loyal and kind and very in touch with his feelings. (He does mess up later in the book when things turn more traditional but for the most part he was lovely.) To make this thing between him and Roxanne work as well as it can, he wants to get to know her. He doesn’t want their relationship to be bloodless. And he hates feeling like a stud.

Roxanne does not want feelings or emotions to get in the way of her plans and Mateo keeps wanting things from her she’s not prepared to give. Roxanne stomps all over Mateo’s expressed wishes and skirts very close to making him walk away from the deal. The story showed Roxanne being an alphahole really well but there was more telling involved when things started to turn around. A lot of their best early conversations happened off page unfortunately and this made it harder for me to believe she was actually the softer person Mateo began to fall for.

The Roxanne of the beginning of the book bears little resemblance to the Roxanne the listener eventually gets to know. I liked the later Roxanne very much but it was like they were two different people and I never quite managed to fit them together in a way that made sense.

The section of the book which takes place in Kansas does showcase the connection between the protagonists and it was here that I began to believe in them as a couple and where the story picked up for me.

Scarlette Hayes is new to romance narrating but obviously has experience with the medium. Her Spanish accents and language were excellent (clearly she speaks Spanish fluently) and I liked her voice, which is on the deeper side of the female register.

However, there were numerous times when a word or phrase wasn’t performed as the text required. For instance, where the wrong emphasis was put on a word or where a sentence had a pause in it before the sentence ended, making it seem like there was a sentence fragment just hanging out there on its own. There were also numerous vocal errors (eg, sedatedly instead of sedately, noisiness instead of nosiness).  It was distracting and I’m surprised it wasn’t picked up in editing.

The initial sex scenes were not at all intimate and Ms. Hayes performed them in a kind of detached way which fit with the two characters who really didn’t know one another. But as the characters fell in love the sex scenes were performed with more intimacy.

That said, even well into the book much of the narrative came across as a bit flat to me, read rather than performed.

For all that I struggled to get into the book at first, once the real Roxanne was revealed I enjoyed the story much more and by the end I was invested in the HEA. I believe Lush Money is the first in a series and I’m hoping Roxanne’s Head of Security is a future hero for a certain Princess…

Kaetrin

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