You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is from Amanda (not me) and trigger warning for the description below:
I need help remembering the title for a book I read a year or two ago.
A rich husband thinks his wife has cheated on him with his brother/stepbrother because that’s what brother tells him after he got caught trying to rape her.
He tosses her out on the street with nothing but a check, which she never cashes even when she finds out she is pregnant and is struggling to keep a crappy apartment working unending hours as a waitress.
He finds her struggling and, when he sees she’s pregnant, he moves her back into his home, even though he still believes she slept with his brother.
He ends up continuing not to believe her until the stress of him throwing it in her face causes her to collapse and almost die from eclampsia.
Any ideas? It’s not a historical romance and is in a present day time period.
The grovel better be good in this one.
Yes!! I know this one 🙂 It is called Wanted by Maya Banks. Have fun reading 🙂
This could be Wanted by Maya Banks. I haven’t read it so I can’t be sure but it fits the description and what I have read by her.
I just read Wanted to find out if the grovel was sufficient, because how could it be?
I had so many questions and opinions before I read it and now I have a zillion more, and I really want to discuss this but don’t want to fill the comments with spoilers.
Can at least confirm this book definitely has the plot outlined in the query!
This grovel had better be so grovely he’s at the bottom of a ten foot hole when he’s done. And then I hope she throws a raccoon in the hole and walks away.
There’s even a manga adaptation!
http://www.emanga.com/detail?itemid=1881
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L3VE12I/
I’m having a really, really, reeeaaaalllllyyyyy hard time imagining a grovel-y enough grovel to make up for this. Am I alone in hoping she gets a paternity test, demands huge child support payments and goes to raise her child as a single mom in a cute cottage in one of those adorable romance novel small towns where she eventually falls in love with the kind, steady, chief of police with a huge family of sisters? Just me?
I’m with you, Lizzy. I don’t think there’s enough grovel in the world.
@Lizzy: Yes! You don’t know how many times I’ve wished for something like this while reading a romance with a cruel and unreasonable idiot hero! I would love it if an author would take the risk and do the unthinkable and unexpectedly dump the hero.
There is no groveling in the universe that could redeem the jerk in this HaBO.
I looked for it and found it under “Wanted by Her Lost Love” at Overdrive.
I have very high grovel standards–apparently I’m just that kind of person. Pretty much 99% of the time, the grovel in books isn’t nearly enough (hey, Linda Howard, I’m looking at you here) and I have to do mental rewrites to make myself happy. And, yes, some of those rewrites include an “FU, I’m outta here” ending. Glad to see I’m not alone!
I have read so many harlequins that are similar to this plot to this. The heroes rarely grovel enough and that infuriates me but I continue to read them
Since my sister had vicious pre-eclampsia and post-partum HELPP, I have zero tolerance for this premise. No grovel could possibly be abject enough to erase that BS. I agree with villette, and would add a skunk and/or wolverine to the raccoon, then shift one of those giant metal cover-roadwork-slabs over the hole, before skipping away, singing.
Hmmm…the guy sounds like a douche, plus I had preeclampsia and nearly died, so Imma skip this one.
Holy smokes, I thought we’d retired this particular trope back around the year 1750 after a few millennia of steady work.
oh dear…
I have read this. While there is in my opinion nowhere near enough grovel, there is more grovel and definitive action than you see from many heroes in this situation and indeed from from many other Banks heroes.
@Lizzy: I have an imaginary romance novel (surely I’m not the only one who has imaginary romance novels? Like imaginary friends, but books?) in which the heroine rejects the alpha-male vampire-space-viking hero that appears on her doorstep because she falls for her next-door neighbor, a single-dad accountant who coaches kids’ soccer on the weekends and always brings up her garbage cans for her.
Love that he brings up her garbage cans!
@cbackson: I’d read that in a heartbeat. I’m so tired of the bdsm billionaires and tycoons. Give me a carpenter, contractor, fireman, cop or librarian. Please.
Can’t tell you how much I miss my old sanitation crew- they always put my cans at the end of my sidewalk and on windy days, in my yard. Miss them so, so much. Most especially on days I’ve had to chase down my errant, windblown cans. Actually need to get new ones as one disappeared last week and both remaining lids are broken.
Wanted by Her Lost Love, Maya Banks
Lizzy and cbackson are now in charge of rewriting the endings of any romance novel that disappoints me.
@cbackson: I have very similar imaginary romances! Someone should start a Harlequin label for beta heros with solidly middle class jobs. Maybe I’m just terribly biased because my husband could never be described as intense, brooding, or terrifyingly wealthy.
A hero who is a farmer. He makes sure her car has a full gas tank, carries out the trash without being asked, and always helps clear the dinner table.
Oh, wait. I married him.
Holy crap. What a weird idea for a story. I had eclampsia, seizures, near-death, the whole enchilada. I don’t think there’s a grovel in the world that could make up for that experience and the ensuing PTSD. I think as a romance novel this could only work if it were mega-Gothic, like if the heroine and the “hero” were fighting about this on a cliffside and the hero grabbed the heroine and said “Why can’t you forgive me?” and she said “STOP FUCKING TOUCHING ME, CARL” and shook him off and he grabbed for her again, rudely, and then lost his balance and plummeted to his death, screaming “I AM SUCH A DIPSHIIIIIIIIIIIT”.
And THEN a nearby park ranger/successful sculptor/beefcake who has always loved the heroine from afar came to her aid and they fell in love as she slowly recovered from the total shitshow her life had become.
Just laughed so hard at Cordy’s suggestion that I inhaled a blanket tassel. I would read the hell out of that book.
Can I just say how much I hate the whole “won’t take money/cash check because of pride” martyr trope when they desperately need money esp. when there are kids involved. He’s a dick – take him for everything and then go back for more and support yourself and your kids in style!
Okay so after reading this HABO I went and read the novel (because I like torturing myself that way). And I have questions!
– WTF is the age difference in this couple? The so-called hero is billionaire CEO resort developer who (though he behaves like he’s 17) is ‘8 years older’ than his adult college-graduate younger brother who ‘he raised’ and whose mother is in her 60s. The heroine ‘has two semesters left to finish college’ ( so….she’s a junior. Why it’s not just stated I don’t know). So she’s … 21 or so?! Holy cradle robbing, dude.
– the heroine dropped out of college and moved to Texas to work as a greasy spoon dive cafes waitress…to save up money to finish school and pay for the baby. Let’s go with the fantasy that it would be possible to save up enough to pay for this on sub minimum wage and tips. Still, why the hell move across the country when that alone is a huge expense???
– So, let me get this straight, the hero’s 60 year old mother cooked up the plan that her 20-something younger son should go over to her older son’s condo to try to pay off the undesirable fiancé. If fiancé refused to be bought off, younger son was to attempt to rape her then call up the older bro and tell him that he, younger bro, slept with the guys fiancé but she was going to tell older bro he tried to rape her. Okay… 1) what the hell kind of plan is that? Deliberate sexual assault w/o penetration so the woman can run to fiancé to tell fiancé brother? Did mom and younger bro never think ‘she could go to the police’ or that older bro might be slightly less of a douchenozzle and would have believed her? 2) what kind of mother thinks up ‘my younger son attempts to rape my other son’s fiancé as a plan? 3) why would any human male with any conscience whatsoever agree to his mothers plan of his committing attempted rape??? 4) what’s the plan here, dude? You agreed to a plan where your brother either thinks you sexxed up the ‘love of his life’ or raped her??? Either way you’re destroying your relationship with your brother (if brother was any less of a douchenozzle than he was).
And the ‘hero’ must have some sort of emotional cognition disorder because he can’t figure out why the heroine is angry with him and his brother.
Seriouslt…..whaaaaaaaaat??!
@Lisa holy whoa, that plots even crazier than the HABO covered. I’m so tempted to read this mess. Maybe my library has it. Who are these billionaires that manage to be incredibly successful without having any intelligence?!
@Lisa, oh my goodness. Thank you for sparing me. OTOH, I can see how this would stick in the mind.
@Lizzy: “Who are these billionaires that manage to be incredibly successful without having any intelligence?!”.
Ummm… that was a rhetorical question, right?
I am sick and tired of reading about billionaires and trillionaires. How are they inherently more interesting than anyone else?
Of course, I sometimes fantasize about winning the Lottery or something and joining their ranks, but I would be an utterly fascinating yet incredibly humble billionaire.
Naturally.
I about lost it in the middle of McDonald’s during the lunch rush when I read that “S” inhaled a blanket tassel as she was reading Cordy’s comment. Thank you, Bitches, for making a solitary meal such a joy.
I was so intrigued by the comments I checked this out from Overdrive. That was a couple o’ hours I’ll never get back! It was also my first Maya Banks read. Big mistake. Good luck getting me to read anything by her ever again. Too many books too many great authors yet to find!
@Julie, I don’t know where in her career Maya Banks wrote this, but I have read some of her stuff and found it well worth my time.
@Gloriamarie I know I’ve seen lots of great reviews / recs regarding Maya Banks’ books. I’m not sure why I’ve not picked up any of those recs.
Ironically my next read, Hope Flames by Jaci Burton, lists Maya Banks in the acknowledgements :D.
This was a train wreck but her historical novel with the deaf heroine is actually quite enjoyable with a genuinely nice hero.