Harlequin never let's me down. These authors never let's me down. Wow.

Just the title have me enough information to let me know that I'll enjoy. From the first chapter I was very intrigued by Dante. I love ready about taboo characters and he gave me everything and more.

At times I got a little bored and then it picked back up so I'm thankful for that.

3.5 stars
The blurb sounded so good and is what drew me to this book. Along with the title. There was definitely a lot of angst. Some aspects of the plot fell short for me and the characters could be frustrating at times. I love these types of Harlequin romances though, so I'd recommend picking this up if you're a lover of these kinds of books as well.

Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a free copy of the book via NetGalley.

I fell right into Marinelli’s first Those Notorious Romanos book, Italy’s Most Scandalous Virgin. From the first page it’s emotional and intense, a story about a rich family whose had its share of scandals and notoriety. (As the series title would suggest!) Dante and Mia have a lot standing between them, but their attraction for each other is crystal clear. The issues that they have to face are painful on all sides, and there are family secrets that must be uncovered – and strong reasons why they cannot, or perhaps should not, be told. I absolutely loved this romance novel, with its beautifully drawn scenes of the Romano mansion, the emotional depth of the events that the characters live through, and above all the feelings and revelations and decisions that the heroine and hero themselves must face – and make – in order to find their Happily Ever After. Marinelli did a great job pulling in some more modern elements as well, lifting what might have been an over-tired trope novel into something new and yet familiar enough to really savor. This is an excellent Presents novel, and I cannot wait to read the next book in the series!

Italy's Most Scandalous Virgin by Carol Marinelli. This is the story of Mia Hamilton and Dante Romano. This being a true Harlequin story that I have always loved. Mia was in a marriage of continence with Dante's father but unknown to him the reason for their marriage. Although Dante was instantly attracted to Mia he labeled her a 'Gold Digger' and had only contempt for her. Now in their present day, Mia is a widower who just wants peace and to leave the family who hates her as soon as she can do so. Dante starts to see that there may have been more going on behind the scene with Mia and his father. But, after a night of them both releasing their pent-up passions they find consequences to that night...which leads Romano back to his first opinion of her. I enjoyed this book.

These titles are fun and easy reads. During the pandemic it's nice to be able to live in a romantic fantasy.

Will he be able to put behind his resentment and trust her ...

I was intrigued to learn more about the why behind Mia’s marriage as the blurb lead to think it was not a love match.
And oh my!
What a drama, a real Comedia del Arte.
For two years Dante and Mia have fought their chemistry, an instant lust awakened on the day they meet, the same day he learned she was to be his father’s future wife.
From there, the love-hate relationship was established, him reminding her she was the woman having broken his parents union.
Mia endured the press gossips and being named with the worst epithets possible. But she bore it as she had few other choices. But now a widow, she promised to keep her late husband’s secrets, if only she was not so much attracted to Dante, a ruthless businessman and reckless lover.
This is a fast read with a lot of plights, not very good but not bad if there had not been the secret behind Mia’s marriage.
I can not understand that in 2020, it could still be an issue in a romance, even if alas being European, I know nothing is easy even if laws were voted, they are still not always accepted and applied.

3 stars

I was granted an advance copy by the publisher Harlequin, here is my true and unbiased opinion.

I am not going to post this opinion publicly, other than here on NetGalley, because I cannot fully explain how and why this novel appalled me without including numerous spoilers.

My bottom-line 2-star opinion: This is a sudsy, homophobic melodrama straight out of the 1950’s, and the slight patina of 2020, anti-bigotry sensibility larded over that appalling truth, in the form of a claim near the end of the novel that Dante and his siblings are not themselves homophobic, and only Dante’s mother is, does not fix the overarching homophobic theme of this novel.

Complete Opinion

In general, I found Mia and Dante to be typical HP, “the virgin and the billionaire” protagonists, neither highly original nor terribly clichéd. But even if they had represented the best of the best of HP, such as the protagonists of Bond of Hatred by Lynne Graham, they could not save this novel from its morally repugnant, essential core.

It is difficult to read, let alone enjoy, a contemporary romance novel published in 2020 in which the romantic conflict keeping the hero and heroine apart is the fact that the heroine Mia Hamilton has been paid an unspecified, enormous amount of money to act as a replacement “beard” for the hero Dante Romano’s closeted, gay father, Raphael Romano.

The hero’s mother, Angela Romano, has known her husband is gay for over 26 years, but chose to stay legally married to him, in a sexless marriage, up until two years before the start of this story, because she refused to surrender the lofty social status and ritzy lifestyle which comes from being married to a billionaire from an ancient, revered Italian family. During all the years she was legally married to Raphael, after the first eight years when she finally figured out her husband was gay and refused to divorce him, she willingly appointed herself his beard and refused to agree to his coming out of the closet.

This venal choice could only have happened because of a combination of ethically debased realities: Raphael was a doormat who catered to Angela’s homophobia, allowing both their lives to be ruled by her self-evident assumption, that she would be utterly ostracized and humiliated if her elite contemporaries were to discover that her husband was gay. But more importantly, and cynically, Angela obviously realized that, if Raphael came out of the closet, there would be no way for her to legitimately cling to her prestigious and profitable marriage. So instead of opting to openly reveal his sexuality, we are to assume he was guilt-tripped into staying in the closet, and they remained married. Not willing to live a celibate life, Angela took a heterosexual lover while Dante was a child and his twin siblings (who were conceived by IVF) were toddlers. The lover was of necessity informed of the real situation and consented to be Angela’s secret sexual partner. However, after over a decade as Angela’s male mistress, the lover finally got tired of being her dirty little secret and pushed her to finally agree to divorce her husband so she could make an honest man of him. Angela only very reluctantly agreed to do that if she could keep the much more prestigious Romano name, and if a suitably pliable and discreet, replacement beard could be found.

And that’s where Mia came in. Due to a horrible car accident while on vacation in the USA, her parents had been killed instantly, and her younger brother had incurred terrible injuries and concomitant astronomical medical bills (no doubt in the neighborhood of $1 million or more, though the amount is never stated) due the fact that there is no free, socialized medicine available in the USA. Rather than consulting an attorney to help her brother set up a long-term payment plan with the hospital in the USA, or having her brother declare bankruptcy and offload the charges completely, Mia decided that she absolutely must herself—though she has zero legal or moral liability to do so—pay off all her brother’s bills from the USA in one, fell swoop. He was at that time currently back in Jolly Old England, where he would never have any more medical bills to pay. But since he is paraplegic, Mia wants him to have a clean, financial slate.

Given her irrational (and extremely melodramatic) hero complex, Mia is ripe to agree to the sleazy arrangement that Angela cooks up as a condition for getting the divorce from Raphael that her lover demands. Mia will pretend to have been Raphael’s gold-digging mistress, who has pushed him to divorce his loyal and loving wife, Angela, so he can marry Mia. Angela isn’t only demanding that her now ex-husband stay in the closet—even though we are told late in this novel that he would really have preferred to come out of the closet and also, presumably, then marry his male lover of 13 years duration. But, no. Raphael’s happiness and that of his lover are as nothing to Angela. She is determined to play the part, on behalf of the paparazzi and any of her friends and family who will listen to her fabricated tale of woe, that she is a wronged, faithful wife of over 30 years. Over the past two years, up until Raphael’s death, Angela has played her self-assigned part with such overblown zeal, that she has ensured that Mia is a pariah, not only within the elite Italian circles that the Romano family is part of, but she has also ensured Dante and his two younger siblings view Mia as the Whore of Babylon.

Complicating this soap-operatic situation is the fact that, from the first moment he met Mia, just before she entered into her homophobic sham of a marriage to Raphael, Dante instantly fell for her, wanting her more than any woman ever before within his long string of “love ‘em and leave ‘em” dalliances, as a gorgeous, young billionaire, with some of the world’s most beautiful women. And it was clear to him that she was strongly attracted to him as well. As a result, the bitter resentment he has displayed toward Mia every time he has unavoidably run into her, as his stepmother, during the two years of her marriage to his father, has been as much due to jealousy and unrequited lust as it has been due to buying into his mother’s deceitful claims of Mia’s “stealing” her husband.

In spite of his long-standing hate and scorn, soon after his father’s funeral, Dante’s squeamishness at the thought of having sex with his father’s widow is overridden by his all-consuming craving for Mia, and he seduces her into having unbridled, unprotected sex on the foyer floor of his father’s mansion. Which, fortunately, doesn’t turn out to be public sex, because the mansion’s army of servants have been given the night off. Afterwards, he feels not only shame but confusion. What in the world is going on? Mia was a virgin!

He obviously wants to know why, but Mia clams up, uncomfortably informing him that she promised not to tell. One can only assume that she is referring to a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). But the problem is, a violation of an NDA can only be brought to court by the person who initiated it, which presumably was Raphael, who is now dead. Even if it were jointly initiated by both Angela and Raphael, or just by Angela, why in the world would she launch a public legal action against Mia for telling her own son what she and his father did? But whatever, this improbably motivated withholding of the homophobic Great Secret of the novel lays the groundwork for this to become the central mystery of the story, which is not revealed until close to the very end of the book.

All of the above comprises the key backstory which is crucial to the central plot of this novel, the romance. It exists as the core romantic conflict, that which keeps Dante and Mia from riding off into the sunset for an HEA. Unfortunately, it is riddled with a whole lot of motivational and ethical problems, including the following:

1. In a modern age when gay marriage has been legal in England for over six years, since 2014, it seems needlessly, morally suspect to create a homophobic romantic conflict like this in 2020. As ethically repugnant as is Angela’s greed-based pressure on Raphael to stay in the closet, it is even more appalling when we are informed that Raphael wanted to come out of the closet, and his lover was “the love of his life.” Why would Raphael be motivated to give preference to a bigoted narcissist of a wife, whom he hasn’t had a normal marriage with for 25 years, rather than to his adored lover of 13 years? Why wouldn’t he come out to his children, whom we are told loved and respected him, and that he in turn loved and respected? Could he not have guessed that such loving progeny are not homophobic at all and would have accepted him? And given that Angela is only finally asking for a divorce because her lover is demanding that she get one, why in the world would she continue, under those circumstances, to have a jot of emotional-blackmail leverage with Raphael to push him into staying closeted?

2. It also makes zero sense to me that, at the end of the book, after Raphael is dead and gone, that it is claimed by Angela, and her three offspring readily agree with her, that Raphael wouldn’t want the truth that he was gay, and his marriage with Mia was a misguided sham, to ever come out? There would be no need to mention the whole sorry situation was entirely Angela’s homophobic scheme. No one would have to know what a scumbag bigot Angela is. But because of the whole family deciding to go along ad infinitum with Angela’s decades-long campaign to keep Raphael in the closet, Mia and Dante are going to have to spend the rest of their lives as the woman who married her stepson, and the man who married his father’s widow. This sordid history, we are told, will cause them to be scorned by the Italian elite society they move in, as well as the Italian paparazzi as an incestuously immoral pair. In fact, it is the fear of this public shaming falling on their unborn twins later in life that is a huge romantic conflict for Mia that causes her to resist openly admitting her unborn children are Dante’s and later resist legally marrying him. But as a case of bad plotting, once she and Dante decide to get married near the very end of the book, in spite of their continuing to go along with propping up Angela’s despicable lies, the author simply drops this whole potential ostracism issue and never mentions it again, leaving that crucial plot thread completely unresolved.

3. When Mia entered her celibate marriage with Raphael, she had no idea whatsoever when Raphael would die from his unspecified illness. Therefore, she could not possibly predict how long she would have to keep up the sham of being his beard, living in isolated, sexless, undeserved ignominy, while Raphael has his beloved to warm his heart and his bed and no social penalty to pay as someone who supposedly dumped his wife for Mia. He could potentially have lived another ten years, or more, while Mia voluntarily surrenders her youth, beauty and best childbearing years to a despicable pretense. We are told she was paid a large lump sum up front to take care of her brother’s medical bills, but nothing else. What kind of fool signs an agreement like that to surrender her whole life, for an indefinite amount of time, for one lump sum, even if it is as much as $1 million? That sounds like a really bad deal.

All in all, this is a poorly motivated, badly plotted, and morally repugnant book!

ARC provided by NetGalley and Harlequin in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Harlequin.

Beautiful Mia Hamilton married a much older man. She entered into an agreement to save face for her husband and also to help with medical bills for her family. With that came a lot of heartache for Mia. She was labeled a gold digger, her husbands family hated her and the most tragic of all was she was attracted to her "step son" Dante Romano. From day one when they first met there were sparks but unfortunately the deal had already been struck for her to marry. She did everything in her power to keep it together and not let Dante or anyone else know she was attracted to him. When Mia's husband dies all Mia wants to do is run away from the Romano family and especially Dante, who she knows just hates her.

Dante couldn't believe his father married a gold-digger!!! And what made the whole matter worse is the day they met he was struck speechless by his attraction to her, only to find out she was in a "relationship" with his father. He fought that attraction for 2 years.

Dante runs the family business and keeps all his family in line. The hate for Mia is strong but he kept things in check with his family and himself. But now that his father has died he's sure she going to contest his will and try to take all she can for herself. But surprisingly during the funeral and reading of the will he sees that things were not what they seemed to be. He also see cracks in Mia's composed demeanor.

Well this is HP land so of course days after the death/funeral Mia and Dante give into their attraction and sleep together. Mia leaves but Dante advises her to let him know if there are consequences as he didn't use any protection. Mia becomes pregnant and at first doesn't let Dante know.

Three months later Dante invites Mia to fundraiser banquet that the family throws yearly. He finds he really misses her. He's reassured early in a phone call with Mia that isn't pregnant, she had said she was fine. She can't stay away from Dante, she really misses him and decides to attend, plus she needs to tell him that he will be a Father (she's ready to tell him now but when he called she was still processing).

They of course can't keep their hands off each other and spend the night together. But the next morning when Mia lets Dante know she's pregnant he believes she planned all this to trap him. Well everything implodes because the family also finds out about them.

The two now have to deal with the outside world as well as family hurling accusations and insults at them. And Dante begins to question his fathers marriage to Mia and begins to wonder if there was some hinden agenda for their marriage. The truth starts coming out. Dante and Mia also work through their trust issues as well as their feelings for each other. Everything is brought out into the open about the past, the marriage, as well as their true feeling for each other. The love between the two prevails and they get their HEA.

This had potential but the execution of the characters was poorly done. More so Mia then Dante. She comes across strong and composed but as the story progresses she becomes weak and somewhat of a mess. And there was a situation in the story that didn't sit well with me at all, so that turned me off to the characters as well.

I did not like this book. The heroine spent part of the book behaving like an ice queen and then just one look and she melts and becomes this weak creature. she is strong for her family but here comes the hero and she melts in his presence. Mia needed to show some restrain, I mean how could she not have a stronger self-preservation feeling. Dante was out to get her for any reason under the sun that did not suit his silly ego. I cannot find anything good to say about this book.

Dante has always been attracted to Mia. The problem is she is married to his father. His father passes away, and he finds he still wants her. Imagine his surprise when the wind up sleeping together and she is a virgin. You will never guess why.