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To Pleasure a Prince

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To Pleasure A Prince by Sabrina Jeffries is very close to being a wallbanger for me because the hero in this book is truly hard to tolerate and the heroine's "growing affection" for him comes off like increasing desperation on her part to emulate her martyr-prone romance heroine sisters. On one hand, I try to be patient with this book. I've read bad boy heroes who push the limits of acceptable behavior, enjoy these books, and there's that. But Marcus North isn't a bad boy as much as he comes off like a snarling caricature, the illegitimate son of the Tasmanian Devil and Wild E Coyote, with absolutely no redeeming feature whatsoever where I am concerned to commend him to anyone other than women who write love letters to men on the death row.
Marcus isn't abusive, physically, but his actions are so offensive to me because he acts like a ten-year old boy denied his candies. His actions are completely self-absorbed. In fact, I don't remember encountering any hero as self-absorbed from start to finish like our Viscount Draker here.
Regina Tremaine is our heroine and she has a secret. Maybe I shouldn't reveal the nature of this secret, so I'll just say that she has a valid excuse to hope that Marcus' sister Louisa be the wife to her brother. Marcus believes that her brother has shady reasons to court Louisa, so he opposes the relationship. Being a heroine, Regina naturally confronts Marcus in his place (with a chaperone that she leaves behind in the carriage, of course, because this is the Amanda Quick Law that every romance heroine aspiring for greatness should adhere to). What results is a bargain: she will allow Marcus to court her for a month in return for her brother being allowed to court Louisa.
Oh, Marcus. I don't know where to start. His overprotectiveness of Louisa is both filled with creepy Freudian undertones and cruel. He thinks that nobody will accept him because he is the son of Prinny and a well-known harlot, so he believes therefore that Louisa will never be accepted in public. That fact that she is doesn't matter to Marcus, all that matters now is that he knows he is right and one day Louisa will get hurt. This is why, when he descends to town, he humiliates both Louisa and Regina publicly - mind you, in front of everyone - because he is right and people suck. It never occurs to him that people probably can't stand him because he is a complete asshole devoid of manners. Seriously, it's not as if he doesn't know what utensils to use or anything - he's worse than that. For someone so concerned with Louisa's reputation, he is her biggest enemy. But of course, Marcus knows he is right, people suck, yadda yadda, so he just keeps on doing what he is doing.
His treatment of Regina is beyond the pale, alternating between pawing her forcefully and, when he's done having his fun, cruelly ripping her pride to shreds. Why? Because Regina is One of Those People, doncha know. People suck. The whole world is out to get Marcus. His father sucked. His mother sucked. Boo-hoo-hoo! So when people are aghast at his horrific behavior in public, that's just proof that he's right and people do suck.
Regina is an intelligent heroine. Her insecurities ring real. However, the author has Regina already scrambling to find any excuse to keep letting Marcus treat her like dirt. Regina holds on to any flimsy evidence that Marcus has some real "goodness" inside him. She lets her family obligation and insecurities force her to keep playing Marcus' games even when she tells herself that she will no longer succumb to his sexual manipulations (which, of course, she always end up succumbing to). By the time she marries Marcus - again, a situation which she feels she has no choice but to do so - this relationship isn't romantic as much as it is about a woman forcing herself to play a cruel man's games.
I keep hoping that Marcus will really, truly grovel, but when he realizes that he wants Regina to stay with him, he decides that he must make her do something related to her secret so that she will stay with him. So once again, even his grand love is all about him. People must do what he wants them to. People must make his life easy. People must do what he wishes if they love him. Or else they suck and he will throw a temper tantrum, wah wah wah. There is an apology, a dismal one in my opinion, towards the end when the heroine is already forgiving him even before he speaks because she is all about understanding the poor little brat who, you know, has his lollypop stolen from him when he was a kid and now he carried a grudge against the world decades later. When I finish this book, I throw my hands up in the air and, eying this book with utter dislike, give it a few hard thwacks of the feather duster just to vent out some of my exasperation that has pooled up in me while reading this book.

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