One Night with the Rebel Billionaire opens appropriately enough with gratuitous nakedness. But don't fret, nudity fans, because there's plenty more where that came from, all dealt with coyly and without description by Trish Wylie, a happy romance author, if you take her word for it. Her 2009 effort tells the story of Roane Elliott, a virginal twenty-seven-year-old whose Dad was the chauffeur for the Bryant clan, owners of the Bryant Corporation, one of those businesses that makes a fortune without offering any explanation of how. Since her father's passing Roane took a job flying clients and colleagues to and from the Martha's Vineyard Bryant home and the Manhattan offices of the company, trips taken daily because the Bryant dynasty hates the environment. Roane grew up with the Brothers Bryant, the younger Jake and the elder, the dark and mysterious and brooding Adam. Jake, the nice one, stayed and ran the family business, while Adam cut himself off from his disapproving father and has never come back.
One starry night Roane meets an enigmatic and gorgeous stranger on her company's private beach. She acts in shocked outrage, but revels in the sight of male flesh in all its dangled glory. You have one guess to guess who this man turns out to be. Did you guess Adam Bryant, the enigmatic billionaire owner of the Bryant Corporation finally returned to make peace with his ailing father? The Other Brother, or Adam, or The Guy would have all been acceptable answers. Now, what a pickle for dear Roane. On the one hand she's instantly infatuated with Adam and his sturdy forearms, rippled pectorals, thick eyelashes (the eyelashes get mentioned a few times every chapter), lazy smile and constantly changing eye colour. Yet on the other hand she's a woman of principle who doesn't jump into bed with any strange man, especially one who arrogantly dismisses her as 'Little Girl' and generally behaves arrogantly. Also, Roane loves Jake like a brother and loves the Old Man Bryant as anyone good-hearted loves a really old man. Not to mention she has had a lifetime of being aware of how terribly Adam treated both of them.
But these minor grievances are merely delaying tactics from the inevitable, and so Roane leaps, nay soars, into bed with Adam and finally experiences the orgasm she had until then only read about in bad romantic literature. Adam, it turns out, is an incredible lover and soon Roane is in love with him, despite knowing that soon he will have to leave Martha's Vineyard for that stuff that he was doing in places other than Martha's Vineyard before the story started. If that sounds vague it's because Adam is darkly secretive and Roane must use her delicate fragility to coax the truth from him. If that still sounds vague it's because the reader isn't delicate or womanly enough to coax the truth from the author. Happily, there is time for the giddied-up couple to indulge in some food shopping and outdoors sex before Roane is forced into remembering all those things about Adam she had been ignoring in order to find him a pleasant companion. However, these things are quickly resolved and had actually just been the result of a series of misunderstandings and plot contrivances. Phew! The only real trouble concerns Adam's relationship with his father, but that isn't important, says the book, skipping the matter entirely, because the father is old. Fuck old people.
There still remains one problem once Adam has finally been portrayed as a nice chap with only the best wishes for other people in his heart. Adam can't give Roane what she wants, and that thing is love. 'I want you,' he tells Roane. 'And I need you, God only knows how much,' but he cannot fully commit to love, because he doesn't know what love feels like. The implication being that God isn't telling. He touches a boiling kettle. 'Is this love?' he asks, with an endearing scowl. 'Oh, silly.' Roane replies, 'Why don't we look up Love in a dictionary, or on Wikipedia?' And they do and then Adam, despite all his intelligence, accepts that he's a ridiculous creation with no credibility as a human being. The End. As endings go it is pretty magical. The epilogue uses the future to emphasize how right the author was when she explained how these two were right for each other, despite the reader's reservations. In fact, Roane and Adam get married and have a baby and call out 'I love you' at inappropriate times in public locations. And thus the book closes at a brisk one hundred and eighty four pages. From a tricky meet cute the couple have made it, going from confidently naked to nakedly confident.
Continuing on from our discussions on the nature of hero and heroine construct, Adam Bryant is a fairly stereotypical Mills & Boon hunk of masculinity. He's cocksure, he's tanned and muscular, he has thick brown hair with specks of blond, his eyes change colour depending on mood, sometimes becoming hooded and lightening during times of levity. He's mysterious and abrupt, he is sexist and cruel and intelligent and a billionaire. And like the very worst kinds of men he doesn't fall in love with everyone he meets, instead falling slowly for the right woman and then mating for life. His only character flaw? Not being in love, an issue revolved by the end of the book, thanks to the hard work and dedication of Roane Elliott, your stereotypical Mills & Boon babe. She's a weak protagonist, but not weak in the virtuous way that all females are weak and therefore adorable.
Roane's journey involves forcing change on the personality of Adam. Her emotional obstacle would appear to be his misguided perception of her. She does not need to change, no, he only needs to see her for who she really is. This happens relatively quickly and then it is merely up to Roane to resolve Adam's problems which stem from an inherent issue of miscommunication over the Bryant Corporation's Assets and fraternal fighting liberally borrowed from Rumblefish. It is a wonder why novels such as One Night with the Rebel Billionaire are chosen as prime publishing fodder by Mills & Boon. Their clichés so clichéd and their stereotypes so stereotypical the stories become self-referential parodies of the genre. There is little here to distinguish Adam Bryant from all the previous and future Adam Bryants and even though he found the happiness he did not deserve the reader will always wish marriage to Roane Elliott on him as punishment for his pathetic behaviour to everyone who seemed to adore him for reasons they will fail to discern.
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