Reviewer: Tracy
The Billionaire Banker and Forty 2 Days by Georgia Le Carre
Publisher: Self-PublishedFormat: eARC
Genres: Erotica
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The Billionaire Banker

When Lana Bloom learns the devastating news that her mother is dying, she is faced with a terrible dilemma. The one thing that can save her is the one thing she does not have.
For young and Innocent Lana, The unthinkable is her only choice.

When she walks through the door of that exclusive restaurant she has no idea of the seismic shift her life is about to take, for the highest bidder will not be the rich man she has accompanied.

Fate drops her at the feet of the deeply mysterious and dazzlingly gorgeous American banker, Blake Law Barrington. Throbbing with raw masculinity and arrogance, this is a man who owns all that he pursues.

And now he wants her.

Lana cannot deny she is both intrigued and intoxicated by the world Blake inhabits and the smoldering passion he stirs in her body, but she is also fearful for this man is addictive and right now she is very vulnerable. She knows she should focus only on the arrangement, but how can she?

When he has opened a door that cannot be closed…

Lana is desperate. Her mother is dying of cancer and Lana is determined that she will live. She has found a place in America (she’s in England) that has an alternative medicine treatment that she would like her mother to try but she needs 50,000 pounds to pay for it. Lana and her mother are very poor and the only thing she has to offer is her body. She has heard that her boss, Rupert, is willing to buy high class whores for 10,000 pounds so she takes a chance and approaches him with her proposition. He is a slimy, nasty piece of work and gives Lana the creeps but he’s willing to pay. They go out to dinner to discuss the transaction and that’s when billionaire banker Blake Barrington sees her.

Blake is immediately taken with Lana’s looks and as he knows her boss (and thinks he’s slime as well) invites them to a party. He eventually gets Lana alone and tells her that whatever Rupert is paying her he’ll double it. Lana is stunned but since Rupert wanted to basically have her be raped, repeatedly but consensually, Lana agrees to the one month deal.

Blake sets Lana up with clothes and an apartment. He also changes the terms of the deal to three months instead of one. Lana agrees and though she’s scared at first she soon realizes that while Blake may look like a cold bastard at times, he’s kind and caring. Lana does the unthinkable and falls in love with Blake but knows she can never be with him. Blake, too, falls for Lana but he can’t tell her as his future is set by his father and his father, and those around him will stop at nothing to make that future happen. Lana does the unthinkable and gets pregnant but according to the contract she signed she either has to terminate the pregnancy or hand the child over to the Barrington’s. When Lana is offered money to disappear she takes it to protect her unborn child.

I had very mixed feelings about this book.

When I first started reading I have to admit to almost putting it down before I got too far. Lana was dressed in an orange dress and horrible orange platform shoes. It was just such a cliché for the poor girl seeking to look upscale and older and it jut didn’t work. I mean, it got Blake’s attention, sure, but he was looking below the wrapping. On top of that I found the writing to be a bit odd. It was told in 3rd person POV, not that unusual, but it was almost as told by a narrator and this caused some of the emotion to slip through the cracks.

The characters, especially Blake, weren’t fully fleshed out – Lana more so as we got to see her friends, her mother, her life in greater detail. We didn’t see anything about Blake’s day to day life – only things that happened when he was with Lana.

Now, despite that, I really liked the story itself. I thought the premise was interesting and I found myself looking forward to what would happen next. I didn’t question Lana and Blake’s love for each other but I couldn’t quite figure out where they would go from there. This is obviously a romance but Blake’s father would never let her stay with him. Because of this I definitely wanted to read the next book to see what happened with the couple.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Forty 2 days

Devastatingly handsome billionaire, Blake Law Barrington was Lana Blooms first and only love. From the moment they touched his power was overwhelming. Their arrangement quickly developed into a passionate romance that captivated her heart and took her on an incredible sexual journey she never wanted to end.
The future together looked bright until Lana made a terrible mistake. So, she did the only thing she could… she ran.

Away from her incredible life, away from the man of her dreams, but she should have known a man such as Blake Law Barrington was impossible to escape. Now, he’s back in her life and determined that she should taste the bitterness of his pain.

Shocked at how rough the sex has become and humiliated that she is actually participating so willingly in her punishment, she despairs if she will ever feel the warmth of his touch—the solidity of his trust again? And even if she can win his trust, loyalties are yet to be decided, and secrets to be revealed—secrets that will test them both to their limits.

Will Lana be able to tear down the walls that surround Blake’s heart, and break him free of the brutal power of immense wealth?

Can Blake hold on to Lana’s heart when she discovers the enormity of the dark secrets that inhabit the Barrington family?

Lana has always believed that love conquers all. She is about to test that belief…

So Lana in book one was paid to leave the country. She didn’t say goodbye to Blake as he was a bit…incapacitated at that time but now she’s back and she wants to start a baby clothing business with her best friend, Billie. She applied for a loan and then made an appointment with the loan officer. When she gets to the bank she doesn’t find the loan officer but Blake – the man she’s not been able to forget after all this time.

Blake is understandably pissed at Lana and wants her to complete the 42 days that she has on the original contract. Lana knows it’s a bad idea but she loves Blake so much that she agrees. Lana tried to pass her son, Sorab, off as Billie’s baby but Blake wasn’t stupid and knows that the baby is his from the first moment he sees him.

Blake is pretty demeaning to Lana when it came to sex, at first, and I had to stop and wonder why she continued to be with him as he obviously just saw her as a sex object and a gold digger. It was almost a “I love the man who abuses me” scenario and I wasn’t really into it. Blake does get better and the book, for the most part, is continued with sex scenes. There is a weird visit from Victoria’s mother when Lana is in the park with her son, Sorab, which puts her on alert that she’s in some pretty grave danger. She loves Blake though and he seems to love her as well, even though he won’t say it. She asks what will happen after the 42 days is up and he only asks her to trust him which she does…for a while.

The book kind of gets into a weird area when Blake’s father gets involved and the self-righteous prick goes mental (he doesn’t really but he’s so damned full of himself!). I can’t tell you more about the ending without ruining it but I will say that it went in a direction that I was not expecting and was so bizarre I’m still kind of going, “Whaaaa?”

This story was told from Lana’s POV so the strange oddness I got from Le Carre’s 3rd person was more or less fixed with going first person POV. I felt much more invested in the couple even though I didn’t particularly care for where their relationship was going.

The end of this book is really what made me pause and figure out how to rate this one. I’ll be completely honest, I didn’t like the end at all. Yes, there’s an HEA but it’s so very tainted by the dark Barrington secret that I couldn’t see Lana being happy in the long run. Oh sure, she’d fool herself because she has Blake but the life that she was going in to was so jaded and dark that I just wanted both her and Blake to run far away and change their identities!

While I liked parts of this story, and I liked the writing better than I did in book one, I can’t say I thoroughly liked this one either. Good, but not great, imho. (Of course reading Goodreads reviews I think I’m in the minority here.)

Rating: 3 out of 5

Giveaway: Ms. Le Carre is giving away an uber-chic Che Che New York handbag; part of the All That Glitters collection. Courtesy of Lana Bloom. Inside pocket holds one solid silver American Eagle one ounce coin from the Barrington family vault and USD100.00. Sign up on the Rafflecopter to enter to win.
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*Please note that this is not a Book Binge sponsored giveaway.