Miss Bates hasn’t read a Crews HP in a while. There can be something overwrought about Crews’s work, but all was toned down, as toned down as an HP can be in Bride By Royal Decree. Crews’s romance’s roots are deeply embedded, maybe deliberately so, in fairy tale. Miss Bates enjoyed it all the more for that reason. Let’s face it: realism, nay plausibility, is not the HP’s companion. We read it as fairy-tale-wish-fulfillment-fantasy and Bride By Royal Decree has this in spades.

Decree‘s premise lies in one of Miss Bates’s favourite fairy-tale elements: the revelation of the heroine’s identity and mysterious past. In Deanville, Connecticut, Maggie Strafford scrubs the floor of her barista-job café when Reza Argos, His Royal Majesty, King and Supreme Ruler of Constantines, walks in with the revelation that Maggy is his long-thought-to-be-dead-and-lost fiancée, Princess Magdalena of Santa Domini. At eight, Maggy had “been found by the side of the road as a feral child with no memory of where she’d come from.” Since then, her “unfortunate childhood in foster care” and subsequent adult poverty made her the snarly, mouthy woman she is. Reza is controlled, proper, and duty-bound, “not a sentimental man” writes Crews, but also an HP-hero. He reveals Maggie’s identity and, despite her lippy disbelief, whisks her away to a private island for princess-grooming where the novel’s main action takes place, soon thereafter to be put in her queenly place in his kingdom. Like many an HP-hero, Reza is a “beast,” not in appearance in this case, but emotionally. He’s coiled inward, with a backstory that makes him balk at emotional entanglement.

Crews’s narrative, like any HP worth its salt, is plot-lite once the fairy-tale premise is established. Crews beautifully navigates how Maggy becomes the woman she was always meant to be, strong, loving, kind, and a truth-teller, while Reza breaks down from the onslaught of feelings Maggy elicits. Before we read of Reza’s delicious emotional unravelling, we’re treated to clever banter. With Reza’s entry into the café, Crews does something interesting: she uses Reza as the fantasy world’s emissary as it encroaches on Maggy’s reality, which is, in turn, ours:

“Tell me,” he said in that same commanding voice that seemed to resonate deep inside of her. “Do you have a small birthmark behind your left ear? Shaped like a lopsided heart?” Maggy felt cold. As frigid as the winter air that had rushed inside when they’d arrived.

“No,” she said. Though she did. And it took every bit of self-possession she had not to reach up and run her fingers over it. He only studied her, his austere mouth flat.

“You are lying.”

“And you’re creeping me out,” she retorted.

While there’s a clever reference to Pygmalion later on, Crews’s Reza is more fairy godmother wrapped up in alpha-hero. It’s a perfect moment, from our contemporary barista McJob to princess thanks to blood, and queen, thanks to alpha-hero. And the fantasy walks in, as potent and powerful as any roly-poly godmother with a wand. He may sport the accoutrements of contemporary wealth, Apple watch and his massively expensive, HD-screen mobile phone, to prove Maggy’s rightful birth, but his presence is the reader’s entry into the HP fantasy. If the heroine buys it, despite her doubtful reply (in tandem with the reader eye-roll), then we do too. In Decree‘s case, Miss Bates was hooked.

Once we, and Maggy, enter the fantasy, the heroine’s transformation, using the tools of commercial trade, clothes, make-up, spa buffing (MissB’s favourite HP descriptions, which is marvelously referred to by Reza as “time in a spa to tend to your air of exhausted desperation”), and comportment lessons (in this case led by Reza’s old-battle-axe nanny), the romance narrative arrives at the matter’s crux: the cold hero’s emotional transformation. Reza’s backstory isn’t half as interesting as Maggy’s and in this may lie one of Crews’s weaknesses. It’s bad-parents standard fare: a cold-hearted mother and cheating father who could never bring his heart to align with his duties, until it destroyed him and nearly his kingdom. With these bitter lessons, Reza vowed to be everything his father wasn’t, especially at the behest of his duty-bound, heart-of-ice mother. He naïvely declares early in his acquaintanceship with Maggy: “distant admiration was the only feeling he intended to have for his queen, as was appropriate. Unlike his father’s disastrous affair of the heart.” At this, of course, every romance reader sniggers and awaits the hero’s emotional comeuppance.

It begins early, with the heroine’s cavalier handling of the hero’s importance. Again, Maggy tries to insert her and our reality into her exchanges with Reza:

“Someone must have put you up to this. Is this some new reality show? The Cinderella Games?”

“Allow me to assure you that I have not, nor will I ever, participate in a show of any kind.” He managed to bite out his words as if they offended him. As if the very taste of them in his mouth was an assault. Then he adjusted the cuffs of his coat in short jerks of indignant punctuation. “I am a king, not a circus animal.” Maggy found that despite having never seen a king in all her life, and having entertained about as many thoughts about the behaviour of monarchs as she did about that of unicorns and/or dragons, she had no trouble believing this man of stone and consequence was one. [Emphasis Miss Bates’s.]

Firstly, Miss Bates has to indulge in a squee about that marvelous wording, “this man of stone and consequence” and the cuffs of “indignant punctuation.” The hero’s nature, hard as stone, impervious to feeling, is the heroine-warrior’s battleground: to enter the breach and reveal the hero’s blocked emotional identity as a man of feeling, beyond his false emotional identity of “stone” and mere social and economic identity of “consequence”.

The hero’s softening occurs in the regions of the heart, regions he hasn’t entered in years and doesn’t initially recognize: “What he didn’t recognize – and did not care for one bit – was this uncontrolled, dark thing he couldn’t identify as it swelled in him. It was as if with her, he truly was nothing but a man.” Gasp. “Nothing but a man.” Not a king, not power and authority incarnate, but a forked, vulnerable creature, an elemental being stripped of birth and breeding. Therein lies the heroine’s power, in extracting, like a rare elixir, the hero’s ability to feel (and then to rely on his ability to reason to figure out he loves her).

How does the hero’s emotional transformation come about? Miss Bates would say, in the HP romance, its a wonderful combination of the hero’s chutzpah-bravery-chin in the face of power, privilege, authority, and desire. There are only two things the HP hero cannot control: the heroine and his exclusive desire for her (which is bound up with the fantasy element of eternal, ensured fidelity). The heroine and his desire for her are the portals through which the hero will be free and able to love. Maggy is a wonderfully earthy heroine and Crews has her scoffing at Reza’s compartmentalizing of desire, as channell-able and control-able:

“But heirs are not made out of civility and respect. That sounds more like a handshake, which, unless it’s different for kings, won’t quite get the job done.”

“This is who I am.” His voice was even more ragged, his gray eyes were more storm than rain, and Maggy stared. That was temper on his face, she was sure of it. Dark and furious. And with something else beneath that she understood instinctively, though she couldn’t name it. She felt it inside her, like a new heat. “There is absolutely no place in my life for this kind of distraction.”

“By this kind of distraction, do you mean a wife? Or a queen?” She studied him. “Or are you talking about a kiss?”

And then she watched him change, right there before her. She watched him beat back the storm and close himself off, one breath to the next. It was as if he rolled himself up tight into an armored ball. She watched his expression clear, then go cold. His gaze lightened, his mouth firmed. He stood straighter, somehow, and that intense, ruthless power from inside him filled the whole of the ballroom … But Maggy had kissed the man. She wanted him back. She wanted the storm. She wanted to dance in it.

… “You seem so … ” She waved a hand at him, not quite as dismissive as his, but certainly a contender. “Upset. I thought maybe there was some royal proclamation forbidding the kingly lips from touching another’s.”

What we have here, Miss Bates argues, is the romance battle-scene, as fraught and difficult to enact as any war novel. Note the heroine’s dismissive hand, dismissing the hero’s imperious one. The heroine enters the fray, armed with her wits and the power her being wields over the hero. They thrust and parry, upper hands are gained and lost. The hero attempts to re-establish his false identity as king, which serves only to protect his heart. But the battle is already lost, as we know, dear reader, because of the heroine’s unique kiss. Princesses made be made, or kissed awake in fairy tales, but the story of the prince’s emotional metamorphosis is told in the genre’s hurly-burly, the “battle lost and won.”

In Crews’s Bride By Royal Decree, the romance’s dark moment must, given the hero’s resistance and weapons, follow the singular and thematically perfect love scene. Why? Because in making love with the heroine, the hero’s emotional vulnerability is exposed in way that is near-unbearable, so he must strike back with the best hurt possible. Maggy, strengthened by years of loneliness and privation, remade in her rightful image, throws down one of the best narrative gauntlets Miss Bates has read.

You have rightly gathered by this point, dear reader, that Miss Bates loved Crews’s HP-romance. With her reading intimate, Miss Austen, she deems Bride By Royal Decree “there is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,” Emma.

Caitlin Crews’s Bride By Royal Decree is published by Harlequin Books. It was released in January 2017 and may be procured at your preferred vendors. Miss Bates received an e-ARC from Harlequin, via Netgalley.

It was predictable and slow getting to the point. Wish it had more depth.

King Reza abandoned the search for his childhood betrothed, Princess Magdalena, years ago. Until the shocking appearance of a photograph of the elusive princess reignites the legend that gripped his nation. Now Reza must return to the hunt and claim his queen!
I found it difficult to get into this story. There was a really large age gap between the two characters and even at the end of the book the relationship still seemed distant between the two.
I liked the main female character Maggy, but overall the two just seemed really unsuited and the story dragged. I usually like this authors books but not this one unfortunately..

I liked this book a lot, I found the characters believable and it was very romantic. These two had great chemistry, even with their rocky start it was good. I would recommend this book.

The latest Harlequin Presents novel by Caitlin Crews takes a Cinderella theme and combines it with a Pygmalion transformation in a sexy and entertaining story.

Orphaned child Maggy ended up in the foster care system at the age of eight with amnesia and no knowledge of her past history. Tossed from one home to the next, she developed a hard exterior shell and her drive to survive is what sustained her when she was left alone again at 18 to fend for herself. Described as ‘difficult’, she’s gone from one job to the next, her temper causing her grief, though her latest waitress job in a small resort town has been going well since she’s curbed her tongue.

But things aren’t always what they seem, and the night that Reza, powerful ruler of Constantine shows up in her coffee shop starts a whirlwind effect on her life. He claims she’s really Magdalena, princess of Santa Domini and his betrothed bride since childhood. Thought to have died in the car crash that killed her parents, for mysterious reasons she ended up in America. Discovering her by chance solely due to a chance photo and her uncanny resemblance to the late Queen, a blood test confirms the truth – she is really a princess, a foster child’s dream turned reality. And Reza is determined that their betrothal will stand. He needs a wife, and an heir.

Maggy for her part is stunned, but quickly accepts the news. I mean, who wouldn’t? The chance to play Princess doesn’t come along every day, and though she still harbors a fear that it’s all a dream, she’s going to enjoy the charade for as long as she can. It’s not hard to be attracted to Reza, the handsome, dominant King – but he tries hard to resist that attraction. His father was ruled by his emotions and not his mind, and Reza is determined not to make that mistake. He offers Maggy a cold and business-like arrangement – can she convince him that the fires burning between them will be long lasting?

Lots of introspective monologues in this one, with Reza and Maggy having multiple thoughts on their pasts and the present. Maggy takes to being a Princess very well. She proves herself to be a fighter from start to finish. I really liked her as a character, her quick wit and her fiery spirit. Some of that gets subdued in her transformation from street hoyden to royalty, though she can’t contain all that heat for long, especially when she senses that Reza is having a hard time resisting her. She’s not above seducing him, and though it’s a slow burn romance, they share some very sensual love scenes in the second half.

Reza’s internal fight over keeping Maggy at a distance so as to prevent any emotional intimacy lasts for quite a while, but eventually he gives in. I really enjoyed the setting of this one, the private island that is a family retreat is well described and the sumptuous royal life is one everyone would love to live (and a private spa, heaven!). It’s an easy and enjoyable read and we get a sweet happy ending for this couple.

This review will be posted at Harlequin Junkie and feedback updated with the link. It (or an abbreviated version) will be posted on sale sites during release week. It has been posted at Goodreads.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just want a really good Harlequin Presents read. I want the tropes to be laid on thick, I want to laugh at the outrageousness of most of it, and I want to lose myself in a world of pure imagination. When I don’t want that itch scratched, HPs are annoying and so I read them selectively. I’m so glad that Bride by Royal Decree is a fab example of the line and that my Christmas break provided an excellent opportunity to enjoy it.

Maggy is an orphan who survived the foster care system to land in Vermont, and now works at a café. Her PoV is busy telling us how hard her life has been, how much she’s struggled, and how proud she is of herself for getting this far when the door of the cafe opens and in walks a chiseled god of a man. Maggy, not one to suffer fools, is annoyed. She informs him that the café is closed, and he informs her that she’s coming with him.

She barks out a laugh and goes back to mopping and telling him to get the hell out of there, when he tells her she’s actually the long-lost princess of Santa Domini and she’s betrothed to him, Reza Argos, the king of The Constantines. Both countries are neighbors and nestled in the European Alps. They make their money in banking and skiing and generally sound too good to be true (because they are).

Maggy is skeptical at best and furious at worst. She agrees to meet Reza later that evening to get a blood test so that the matter can be put to bed. Of course, the blood test confirms (instantaneously! Because that’s how DNA works!) that she is Princess Magdalena Santa Domini and they must depart the U.S. immediately so she can assume her duties quickly.

Their chemistry, in case you were wondering, is instantly smoldering. They are well on their way to true love before they even board the plane. The PoV switches frequently, so we get inside both of their heads, which adds to the sense that this story just wraps itself around your brain. This fantasy world is sumptuous.

First of all, Maggy has to go to princess school so that she can get made over both inside and out. She has to learn diplomacy, royal history, and posture, alongside proper care of one’s nailbeds if one is going to be photographed constantly. She also has to learn how to not be the scrappy orphan she’s been for most of her life and go back to being the princess she was for her first ten years. That was when her parents were killed in a car accident and everyone thought she was with them. Instead, she was secreted off to the U.S. and put up for adoption. So, the accident was no accident and was instead a hit! She was supposed to die, but was spared instead. In this, Bride by Royal Decree borrows a lot from both Anastasia and Pygmalion.

Reza, for his part, has been king since he was twenty-three. He has learned to ruthlessly suppress his humanity and focus entirely on being a proper ruler. When his attraction and love for Maggy threatens to force his humanity to overrule his royalty, he panics completely. Can they overcome his panic and find the true love that will unite both their countries into a peaceful harmony? (Of course they can. It’s a HP novel.)

Y’all, when it comes down to it, this book is exactly what it says it is and is properly delightful. If you’re into the royals trope (which I am) or the arranged marriage trope, and are in the mood for a well-executed contemporary romance, then one-click this, pour your favorite frothy beverage, run that bubble bath, and enjoy.

reviewed by AAR's Kristen