As I mentioned in my review of The Vampire and the Virgin, I hadn’t realized I was reading the eighth book of a series. And even though they don’t need to be read in order to understand whats going on, I’m one of those people who happens to be quite picky about reading books in order. So here is book one of the Love at Stake series.
In How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire we meet Roman Draganesti a centuries old vampire who also happens to be a brilliant scientist. One night he loses one of his fangs and he needs to have it implanted that night so that his feeding veins don’t close up while hes sleeping during the day. Enter Dr. Shanna Whelan, or Dr. Jane Wilson. After being witness to a massacre by the Russian mafia she was relocated in the witness protection program. Now she works the night shift at a 24 hour dentists office in Soho. When Roman comes into the office that night to get his tooth put back into his mouth they hit a snag, the very men Shanna is running from have found her and are planning an attack at the dentists office.
Roman takes Shanna into his own protection when he finds out one of his Russian vampire enemies has been hired as the hitman to take Shanna out. It’s never as easy as it seems. Roman feels things that he hasn’t thought of in hundreds of years. And Shanna well there is plenty of anger, jealousy and confusion to go around. Oh and disgust once she learns about the harem. Attacks on Roman’s business also create a bit of a problem. But in the end they get their happy ending, even though daddy isn’t too happy about it, and that is what counts, right?
My thoughts:
I definitely liked this one. I got some good laughs out of it, and of course there’s the obligatory happy ending that I’ve been feasting myself on for the last month or so.
There are however a couple of things that bothered me a bit.
First, I’m all about a tortured hero, but honestly I didn’t want to read Roman’s whining about his last mortal love and how she almost killed him when he was defenseless during the day when I had just read the same in The Vampire and the Virgin. Since this book was first though, and they were five years apart, maybe that’s why she used it in both. But to reading them so close together just made it annoying.
Second, Roman had an Edward Cullen kinda thing going on with the soul damned to hell and what not. However! This was published BEFORE the first Twilight book. So, basically it annoyed me, but there isn’t anything wrong with her having a character be the same way as another. At least not in this circumstance.
Aside from those two factors I enjoyed How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire. VANNA was something to laugh at for sure, and the part where Roman lost his tooth, well even if I hadn’t been decided on reading the series before that, that whole scene would have changed my perspective.
Among Stories 