The Consequence of His Vengeance
3.75 - 4 starsI have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it was engrossing and filled with angst. On the other, Darius was a jerk, and it took a while to warm up to a guy whose only motivation for seeing his ex was revenge. He's going to seduce her for dumping him the day they were going to elope, when she was eighteen. Letty's rejection of Darius was an act of desperation and love; her father had just confessed to running a Ponzi scheme, and she didn't want to put Darius's dreams of starting a software company in danger.
I hated Letty's father. He emails Darius, pretending to be Letty, offering to spend the night with him for a hundred thousand dollars. Letty has been scraping by, working at a diner for the past 9 years. After her father's fall from grace, her life took a nose-dive too. People blamed Letty for cheating them out of millions just as much as they blamed her father. With little money, Letty still allows her father to move into her dingy little apartment, and she even pays all the bills after he breaks his arm. He repays her generosity by making Darius think she's a prostitute. What a selfish jerk.
After Darius uses, abuses, and throws Letty out of his home, throwing a check at her and telling her to find her own way home during the wee hours of the morning, he wasn't my favorite character, either. When he discovers that his plan for revenge ended up with Letty pregnant, he forces her to marry him. She doesn't have the money for a custody battle with the billionaire (this is the second book in less than a week with this trope!), and she's not willing to give up custody of her baby. She still has feelings for Darius, though, and warns him that once he marries her, he, too, will become a pariah among New York City's wealthy elite, he doesn't believe how poorly she has been treated since her father's fall from grace. Once a society girl, she was blamed just as much as her father for his crimes.
When I started this book, I did not think I would enjoy it. Darius is an ass at the beginning. Letty's father is a cunning conman who doesn't hesitate to use his daughter to get himself out of hot water. Letty was a passive doormat. Then about halfway through the story, Darius changed, and Letty changed, and I started turning the pages with more enthusiasm. Though it took Darius far too long to confess his feelings to Letty, I started to forgive him. Once Darius admitted that he was just as much to blame for his unhappy past, if not mostly to blame for it, he became more human, and I believed in their HEA.
