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True confession time – I read The Price of Scandal in a day.  Less than actually. I woke up with about 30 pages left in a book, and this was up next, so I started it on a Saturday morning and fell asleep (well after my bedtime) during the bonus epilogue with only a few pages left, which were completed first thing Sunday.  It was the weekend, we didn’t have a ton of plans, and I just wanted to lay around, so I did. And it was fantastic.

Let me back up, this is an open door romantic comedy with the tropes of enemies to lovers and billionaires, but it’s more than that too.  Emily Stanton is the CEO of a research-based skin care brand with a fast approaching IPO.  Her work is her life, her family is a mess, and her friends are the only thing keeping her functional.  Drama happens in the form of a blind date gone horribly wrong, and our hero, Derek Price, steps in to save the day. Because that’s his job, he’s a celebrity scandal fixer.  There are complex family issues to navigate, the paparazzi to manage, and Derek has to make the ice queen Emily likeable to the public so her IPO will succeed because that’s what she wants, or so she says.  That’s the tame part. There’s also a meet-nude, an injured alligator with a 3-D printed prosthesis, and a bit of a mystery about who can Emily really trust.  Oh and, Emily and her friends developed and manage the community they live in, so we also have a town hall to attend with the eccentric residents of Bluewater in Biscayne Bay.  This is a great escape read that is thoughtful and includes characters I’d love to be friends with, or even sit at the next table at brunch from, to eavesdrop on their amazing conversations (which they do to a group of romance novelists – yes, the authors of the series have a cameo!).  

This book is entertaining, well-written, and funny.  It is clearly out to be deep and astonishing and it succeeds.  I imagine (seriously, this is all me, I have no idea, but I’d love to) these books were written something like Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  After the text of that novel, there’s an about or notes section wherein Pratchett and Gaiman tell you how they started writing Good Omens back and forth with the goal of creating an astonishing comedy and generally making it superbly challenging to raise the stakes in the next section.  That book is creative and very funny (also very British), and so is this book (not the British part, but the rest). Score took a typical trope and turned it around, while also being respectful of all the characters involved. 

Derek isn’t Emily’s assistant, he’s a very successful CEO in his own right. Emily isn’t a damsel in distress, but she is outside of her skill set with this situation and the way it may influence the upcoming IPO. Emily has struggles that feel very typical to successful women (even those who aren’t billionaires or CEOs), as when Emily says “I took my time with my hair and makeup. On a good day, they were weapons. But today they would also be a shield.” I hope I’m not the only one who does that, because she feels the need for a little extra, some days.  Oh and also, “When in doubt, dress in head-to-toe black.”  I *may* have done both on the same day last week, and y’all, all of it helped me feel better about my day and what I needed to accomplish (and it went superbly, thanks for asking)!

The bonus epilogue – y’all.  If you know much about kids or have kids, YOU NEED TO READ THIS.  The action is just as ridiculous as the rest of the book, but the way they talk about their kids, the realness of the fierce love for them and the desperate need to get away from them was just what my soul needed after a lot of togetherness with my children during the holidays.  

~Nikki  

When we started seeing algorithmic advertisements for the Bluewater Billionaire series of books in early Fall 2019, I had not read any books by author Lucy Score, even though her oeuvre had been on my Romance Radar for quite a while. She pops up as a suggestion every time in Amazon’s ‘Recommended For You’ carousel. All of her books are available for free with a Kindle Unlimited Subscription, or you can purchase the kindle books from between $2.99 to $4.99, depending on the title, or in paperback. According to her bio pages, “Small town contemporary rom-coms are her lady jam.” Lucy didn’t disappoint in the small town, contemporary, rom-com, or lady jam genres when Nikki and I read The Christmas Fix during our 2019 Kindle Unlimited Holiday Romance Binge. (Caveat Lector: Secondary characters are the hero and heroine of Mr. Fixer Upper, so if reading a timeline out of order bothers you, read Mr. Fixer Upper first!)

Since Nikki covered the plot of The Price of Scandal so well, I want to discuss my favorite part of this book, besides the smut, sass, and general awesomeness, which is the characters’ relationships. I am not just talking about the romance between Derek and Emily, but all of the relationships that surround them. Of course, there is the deeper-than-friendship between our four badass billionaire heroines, Emily, Cameron, Luna, and Daisy. #SquadGoals for damn sure. What makes Emily and Derek so relatable, however, is that even though they are uber-successful in their own fields, they still act like a typical human being when relating to their employees and relatives. (Not all trope-y billionaires act like human beings to their relatives ::cough:: Christian Grey ::cough::) I am saddened by Emily’s relationship with her mother. She doesn’t feel supported by her mother who still thinks a woman without a man is nothing, even if that woman is a billionaire CEO and badass scientist. Emily is even jealous of the easy relationship Derek has with his own mom, ugh the feels. However, my favorite relationship of Emily’s might be the friendship she has with Jane, her bodyguard/chauffeuse/girl-Friday. (I am so here for Jane’s story, Lucy. #sorrynotsorry) There is such trust between them, and Jane is there for Emily in whatever way she needs (or doesn’t even know she needs) to be supported – breakfast carbs or questionable bottles of Fireball are prime examples. OK, fine, and how Jane was #TeamDerek way before Emily had even agreed to play the game.

There are so many more things I want to talk about, but they are too spoilery for a blog post. (Perhaps like the double-meaning of ‘price’ in the title…) I still want to leave you with my favorite laugh out loud quote, the context for which you will need to read the book!… “Good Luck, Orphan Derek.”

~Ashley