Sheikh Romances - Sexy Sheikh Bundle

Oh, boy.  This is one of those things I can't believe I'm confessing to reading.  But one of the romance categories for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 Reading Challenge was a sheikh romance.  Sheikh romances are notoriously terrible and, it seems, notoriously short.  But I always feel like reading a novella instead of an actual novel is cheating, for some reason, so I got a bundle of three novellas out of the library with the thought that, together, I would have done my due diligence.  Enter the "Sexy Sheikh" bundle.  There are three books in this bundle, all of them put forth by the imprint of "Harlequin Presents."  Oh yes.  They're Harlequin.  All three are contemporary stories, each by a different author and characters--no overlapping or connections here.  Let's take a short look at each of them in order.

The first book is Exposed: The Sheikh's Mistress by Sharon Kendrick.  This is actually the reason I got this bundle, because another reader in the group read a Kendrick sheikh romance and said it actually wasn't terrible, which is high praise for something in this subgenre.  The story here follows Sienna, an event planner whose life is upturned upon the reappearance of Hashim, the guy (and sheikh) she was involved with years before until he found out she'd posed for topless photos in a calendar in order to pay her mother's medical bills.  Clearly, this made Sienna the worst sort of trash in his eyes, and so he dumped her, only to come back years later to torment her/have sex with her.  This will quickly become a theme in this bundle: it's totally okay to hire someone to work for you just because you want to have sex with them, and then sexually harass them until you get what you want.  Oi.  Anyway, Sienna eventually concedes to being Hashim's official mistress, but the scandal is revealed to the media!  Gasp!  I honestly didn't feel that these two had any chemistry, and Kendrick didn't do a very good job of developing plot or character here--another theme in this bundle.  It's totally possible to do a good job with both plot and character in a novella, but none of the authors seemed to feel like doing that here, which was disappointing.


Next up is The Sheikh's Innocent Bride by Lynne Graham.  Heroine Kirsten works at a castle as a servant in hopes of saving up enough money to escape her extremely restrictive and abusive father.  Her world is turned upside down when the castle's owner, Shahir, shows up and becomes interested in her, despite him being her employer.  Things quickly get out of control, Kirsten gets framed as a thief, and runs away to London.  The drama escalates from there.  This engaged in the "secret baby" trope, as well, which is not one of my favorites.  Of course, Shahir finds out and immediately decides that he must marry Kirsten so their child can inherit his country, which really seemed like the flimsiest logic of all time.  I mean, he thought Kirsten was a thief, and wasn't entirely convinced she wasn't a slut even though he knew she'd been a virgin when they got together, and really seemed inclined to think the worst of her in every way, and definitely wasn't in love with her, and yet he rushed off to marry her.  It seemed far more likely that he would have taken the age-old way out of giving her some money and then never speaking to her again.  Again, this book involved copious sexual harassment from a superior and emotional abuse by the hero, and really no development of characters to compensate for the flimsy plot.  They're not in love and then they are, happily ever after, the end.  Meh.  Probably my least favorite of the three.


And finally, there's Stolen by the Sheikh by Trish Morey, which actually appears to be the second in a series of novellas, though this bundle didn't include the first.  Heroine Sapphire is a rising star of a fashion designer in Italy, expected to marry her on-again, off-again lawyer boyfriend.  When Khaled shows up and commissions her to design a wedding gown for his bride, she reluctantly agrees on orders from her boss, and finds herself spirited off to Khaled's home country and palace--because he is, of course, a sheikh.  The plot, that Sapphire is actually the person Khaled intends to marry, is pretty transparent to us as readers, though I actually can't fault Sapphire for drawing the initial conclusions she does, weird as the situation is.  There's a revenge plot going on here as well, of course involving Sapphire's boyfriend.  Morey does throw in a bogus terrorism subplot as well, one that comes out of nowhere and then doesn't go anywhere, either, and mainly revolves on a lot of infodumping about a minor character who was completely unnecessary.  Still, I liked the romance here, flimsy as some of its trappings were, and thought that Khaled and Sapphire had a bit more character to them than the main characters in the other books in the bundle.  This was a tropey book, what with the minor Stockholm syndrome and all, but I think it was the strongest in the bundle and I liked it the best.

Overall, was this a good bundle?  No, of course not.  Was I expecting it to be?  No, not really.  But considering I went to it because I actually had to toss aside the other book I'd planned on reading for the category because it was such trash (the offensive kind, not the fun kind) I guess I got off easy.  I've actually read a few historicals in this genre that weren't absolutely horrible, as far as I can remember, but it seems like tastes for this trope have shifted to the modern, and the quality hasn't shifted with them.  Sigh.  2 stars for the lot--I can't even really justify 3 for Stolen, though it's probably a stronger 2 than the others.