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Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

Theme: Off Limits Sibling or Friend, Workplace

Archetype: Athlete

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Eliza. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Short Contemporary Romance category.

The summary:

Cooper Larson doesn’t care about finding Hollister Cain’s long-lost daughter, even though a huge inheritance hangs in the balance. As Hollister’s illegitimate son, the renegade snowboarder broke away and made his own millions long ago. So when his former sister-in-law Portia Callahan insists she’s spotted the missing Cain heiress and solicits his aid, it isn’t money that motivates him. It’s his long-forbidden hunger for Portia. So he agrees to help if she’ll collaborate on an event to finance his latest venture. With Portia finally within reach, he quickly melts the cool society princess’s resistance…but will the barriers that kept him a black sheep before get the better of him now?

Here is Eliza's review:

I decided to read this book as it’s part of the Harlequin mini-series entitled “At Cain’s Command” for which I had read one of the prior books. The underlying storyline tying the books together is the search for a previously unknown illegitimate Cain daughter, the half sister to the male protagonists in the books.

“A Bride for the Black Sheep Brother” starts with a strong prologue that solidly establishes the moment our hero, Cooper Larson (an illegitimate Cain son), is first attracted to our heroine, Portia. It is a great “Oh shit” moment for him because it’s at her wedding to his brother. The prologue was a great hook because you felt what each character was dealing with in that moment and it made you want to know what happened between them next.

Chapter one picks up 12 years later during a charity event, after Portia is conveniently divorced. Portia meets a woman she thinks is the missing Cain daughter while she is being berated by her mother for not behaving in a proper manner as perceived by high society. The mystery woman steals the scene and piqued my interest, but then totally disappears to become only a plot device to bring Cooper and Portia together. The story felt a little flat for me from that point on until about half-way through the book for a few reasons which I’ll try to suss out here.

Part of what bothered me was the first half was mostly bland world building. I like stories that consistently build sexual tension until “BAM” the protagonists can no longer resist and give in to their mutual attraction. However, most of the first part of this book follows Portia getting wound up about the missing Cain sister and deciding to drop in on Cooper to convince him to help.

Conversely, we learn about Cooper’s determination to get his snow-boarding company to endorse buying and investing in a rundown resort. These two things intersecting to bring them together in the same space again felt a bit contrived. Also, you can tell Cooper still likes Portia at this point, but we don’t really get a solid sense of the same from Portia other than he unsettles her. We get to about 48.66% through the book when Cooper finally comes out with how he’s had a thing for her since her wedding and wants her in his bed. At which point things progress much faster between them than I would expect from the first part of the story, but also about how fast you would expect when you’re running out of pages.

Later in the book Portia and Cooper do have chemistry, and there is a nice heat to their interactions. Their biggest obstacle is the usual trope of their preconceived and incorrect perceptions of each other’s wants and needs. This ends up being somewhat derivative and predictable in the end. Also while Portia is cute and passionate at times, I really wanted her to have a moment of growth and self awareness that she was an awesome person in her own right, but that never happened. I kept expecting this because a lot of Portia’s story seems to be about how for some unclear reason she molded herself into the perfect debutante and therefore suppressed her “real” self. She also seemed insecure. It was frustrating that these themes were repeated a bit but she never has a real moment of triumph in which she fully embraces her real self, defies her mother, and does what she wants in the face of society.

Overall Portia was occasionally adorable, I liked Cooper, but I was a little bored by the story which was occasionally spiced up in the second half. I may pick up the 4th book because I’m curious about the illegitimate Cain daughter. As it wasn’t badly written and just didn’t engage me, which might have been because of my desire for the characters to develop differently than they did.