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 request is from Shash, who is looking for some Mills and Boons crazysauce:
This was romance that got me hooked onto romance (why I don’t know because it had a good dose of crazysauce). It was a Mills and Boon pink cover (so like their normal line I think, medical was blue etc) and maybe from the early 2000s late 90s. Found it in the Hong Kong City Hall library.
It was a friends to lovers with a “fake” marriage. Hero is family friend of heroine’s. For some reason she has to get fake married in front of her family so he steps in. The might have kissed on the stairs at some point. They get “fake married”. Think his name was James or John or something. There was some toe-sucking involved in one of the lovemaking scenes.
Oh and the twist – it’s revealed at the end that they actually got married, not fake married because he swapped the fake officiant with a real minister. It was portrayed as “yay we don’t have to get married for real again,” but I remember being turned off at such a gross violation.
Definitely agree with Shash on this one.
And is there a sequel where she divorces him for real and takes up with a man who’s honest with her from the start? One can always hope.
Though I suppose if the whole premise of the story involves lying to everyone she knows, I suppose it’s poetic justice.
I’m sorry, but toe-sucking invariably reminds me of David Mellor http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/24/newsid_2529000/2529115.stm This is not good.
i don’t remember if there’s any toe-sucking but the hey-guess-what-we’re-not-fake-married thing happened in Married by Mistake by Renee Roszel.
I remember this one! Let me stew a while.
OMG -m- you’ve cracked it! I NEVER thought ANYONE would be able to find an old British book on this American website with so little detail but I underestimated the magic of the SBTB community! Lol I couldn’t find an e-version but I searched on google books and the toe-sucking was there! hahaha thanks -m- for finding it and Amanda for running my HABO. Finally reunited with my problematic first 😛
Looks like Amazon has the book in kindle for $2.69
@Shash: I can’t believe I’ve solved an HABO!
I actually have it on my e-reader, that’s how I remembered it. When I first got my Kindle and I found out there were cheap old romance novels (that in Belgium came out as Harlequin), I guess I felt nostalgic, remembering how I stole them from my mother as a teen and I bought some 🙂