Review: The Price of a Bride

The Price of a Bride by Michelle Reid
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

1 ⭐- Ugh! Didn't like it or triggers or pet peeve!
=====================================

Did he truly believe he would be standing here at all if Jack Frazier thought he couldn't be bought?

He could walk out of here with his arrogant head held high and his monumental pride still firmly intact, but put aside for ever the one special dream that had brought him to this point in the first place, or he could relinquish his pride, let his own principles sink to Jack Frazier's appalling level and pay the price being asked for that dream.

Jack Frazier was a brute and a bully.

'We will marry. We will do everything expected of us to meet your father's filthy terms! But don't,' he warned, 'let yourself think for a moment that it is going to be a pleasure!'

'I have a mistress in Athens with whom I am very happy,' he announced, using words like ice picks that he thrust into her. 'She will remain my mistress no matter what I have to do to fulfil my side of this filthy bargain! I will not be discreet.' he warned. 'I will not make any concessions to your pride while you live with me as my so-called wife! I will hate and despise you—and bed you with alacrity at regular intervals until this child of the devil is conceived, after which I will never touch you again!

She would not remark on his own personal life outside their marriage, and she accepted totally that he intended to maintain a mistress...

'Are you at last beginning to wonder if five million pounds is worth the kind of purgatory you are about to embark upon if you marry me?' this particular tormentor prodded silkily.

He'd punished her by introducing her to the two lawyers he'd called in to witness their signatures as 'the woman who is this desperate to bear my child' as he'd tossed the contract towards them to sign. It had been cruel and unnecessary but he hadn't cared.

'I will make you beg...'

Mia begged.

'Like this?' he taunted. 'Is this what the five-million-pound wife requires?'

But in the end he said nothing, and maybe that was just about the biggest insult he could have paid her as he walked out of her bedroom in total silence.

To prove his point, the hand still lost in her hair tightened, tugging her head backwards until she had no choice but to look at him.

'Was it like that with the rock star?' he questioned. 'Did you fall apart as spectacularly for him as you did for me?'

Watching her. Watching her with a bite in his eyes that told her exactly what he thought of her lack of control. Whore, that expression said. Whore.

'Save it,' he said insolently, 'until later. I have a mistress to console before I can come back here and console you.'

With that final humiliation biting deep into her senses, he let go and stepped back from her.

'I have a mistress to console before I can come back here and console you...' She would come second.

The mistress. The other woman. Did they know that he had climbed out of her bed only to climb into another bed with his mistress? Humiliation poured into her blood, searing a path to a temper few knew she possessed.

A hand grasped her shoulder. 'Wake up,' a deeply masculine voice insisted.

'She was fine,' he muttered, 'but now I want you.' 'You're disgusting,' she said, and tried to wriggle free, but he wasn't about to let her. 'Nevertheless, when I want I take and you deliver,' he said harshly. 'Don't ever say no to me again.'

His mouth left hers and he laughed. It was a sound far distant from humour but held angry triumph. 'What a hot little thing you are when you let yourself go,' he taunted. 'No wonder you preferred me to that grotesque little man who was knocking sixty. He could not have given you half this much pleasure.'

...and grabbed hold of the edge of her nightdress, tugged it up around her hips and entered her. No foreplay, no compunction.

The man didn't give a damn about her as a living, breathing human being, and went on to prove it by not coming back to the island for the next seven days.

'Whatever it is,' he muttered huskily, 'we may as well enjoy because once you are pregnant it will be over.'

But, true to his word, he never came to her bed again.

'You know,' he muttered, 'you are a whore in a lot of ways.' With an angry movement he unfastened his seat belt and stood up. 'You sell yourself cheap and you see yourself as cheap!'

View all my reviews