Narrated by Scarlette Hayes

Lush Money is a kind of gender-flipped Harlequin Presents with a billionaire heroine being the jerky alphahole instead of the usual HP alphahole male. I didn’t appreciate this when I requested the book for review.  Had I known I may not have done so because HPs are not my favourite – I have a low tolerance for alphaholes.

Roxanne Medina, CEO of Medina Now
Enterprises, based in San Francisco, is a (somewhat improbably) 29-year-old
self-made billionaire and very much a control freak. She doesn’t trust people
and doesn’t appear to have any close friends. She is an only child, doesn’t
know her father and is not close to her mother. Roxanne’s business is built
around building up female-owned businesses so it was curious to me that she
seemed so friendless. She comes across as very cold but her business and
ambition seem to have more heart behind it than that.

In any event, Roxanne has decided she wants
a child and, not wanting said child to grow up without knowing their father,
has determined she wants to get pregnant the old-fashioned way – but with a
billionaire twist.

29-year-old Mateo Ferdinand Juan Carlos de
Esperanza y Santos is the “golden prince” and heir to the throne of the
fictional Monte del Vino Real in north-western Spain. His parents are not-nice
people. His father in particular is a real piece of work. He’s a cheating
cheatypants and extremely bad with money. Mateo is all the things his father is
not and is very concerned about his country which is being run into the ground
by his parents’ spendthrift ways. He is a scientist and vintner and has
developed a new grapevine which in about three years will, hopefully, save his
country. In the meantime, he’s trying hard to put off creditors and keep things
okay at home. He is mostly based in San Francisco, working out of the UC Davis
campus.

Mateo’s father, King Felipe, has made a
deal for Roxanne and Mateo to marry. They will be married for one year and will
have 3 nights together every month (when Roxanne is most fertile) in order to
get her pregnant. They will then divorce and share custody (I was a little
vague on exactly how this was supposed to work) of the child. In return Roxanne
will pay off Monte del Vino Real’s debts. Of course, Mateo has to agree to this
and he’s not at all keen at first. However, very reluctantly, he does agree because
reasons. He then has second, third and fifty-fourth thoughts because Roxanne is
difficult to know and, initially, difficult to like. I felt the same way as
Mateo.

Mateo is wonderful. He’s gorgeous (of
course), clever, faithful, loyal and kind and very in touch with his feelings.
(He does mess up later in the book when things turn more traditional but for
the most part he was lovely.) To make this thing between him and Roxanne work
as well as it can, he wants to get to know her. He doesn’t want their relationship
to be bloodless. And he hates feeling like a stud.

Roxanne does not want feelings or emotions
to get in the way of her plans and Mateo keeps wanting things from her she’s
not prepared to give. Roxanne stomps all over Mateo’s expressed wishes and
skirts very close to making him walk away from the deal. The story showed
Roxanne being an alphahole really well but there was more telling involved when
things started to turn around. A lot of their best early conversations happened
off page unfortunately and this made it harder for me to believe she was
actually the softer person Mateo began to fall for.

The Roxanne of the beginning of the book
bears little resemblance to the Roxanne the listener eventually gets to know. I
liked the later Roxanne very much but it was like they were two different
people and I never quite managed to fit them together in a way that made sense.

The section of the book which takes place
in Kansas does showcase the connection between the protagonists and it was here
that I began to believe in them as a couple and where the story picked up for
me.

Scarlette Hayes is new to romance narrating
but obviously has experience with the medium. Her Spanish accents and language
were excellent (clearly she speaks Spanish fluently) and I liked her voice,
which is on the deeper side of the female register.

However, there were numerous times when a
word or phrase wasn’t performed as the text required. For instance, where the
wrong emphasis was put on a word or where a sentence had a pause in it before
the sentence ended, making it seem like there was a sentence fragment just
hanging out there on its own. There were also numerous vocal errors (eg,
sedatedly instead of sedately, noisiness instead of nosiness).  It was distracting and I’m surprised it wasn’t
picked up in editing.

The initial sex scenes were not at all
intimate and Ms. Hayes performed them in a kind of detached way which fit with
the two characters who really didn’t know one another. But as the characters
fell in love the sex scenes were performed with more intimacy.

That said, even well into the book much of
the narrative came across as a bit flat to me, read rather than performed.

For all that I struggled to get into the
book at first, once the real Roxanne was revealed I enjoyed the story much more
and by the end I was invested in the HEA. I believe Lush Money is the
first in a series and I’m hoping Roxanne’s Head of Security is a future hero
for a certain Princess…