Who doesn’t love a good billionaire romance book? Except this time, there’s a twist — the female main character is the billionaire in Lucy Score’s “The Price of Scandal.”
“The Price of Scandal” is one of Lucy Score’s earlier novels, and quite possibly, one of my favorites. It has it all: scandal, humor, drama and likable main characters. It doesn’t get any better than that! Also, the love interest is slightly British, so somehow even better…Let’s dig in!
As far as characters go, I really liked Emily, our billionaire in the book. She owns a skin care empire, but she also does a bunch of science and girls in STEM stuff on the side that not many people know about. While she can be a bit pretentious at times, it’s not overly so. Overall, she was decently humble and hard working. And then enter Derek, Emily’s love interest and professional scandal-diffuser. The guy was charming and witty and didn’t take an BS, which I liked. Some things he did made me cringe, but I feel like that’s the price of romance books sometimes.
The side characters were also a lot of fun. Emily’s personal assistant Jane was hilarious and the hype girl every friend needs. Emily’s group of billionaire friends were also likable and the best kind of friends that everyone should have. Emily’s family and college bff, though? Oh, how I hated all of them, but we’ll get to that later.
Now, let’s talk what I liked most about the book: THE DRAMA. Without spoiling too much, Emily’s college bff Lita was a handful, as was Emily’s little brother. The book starts with Emily landing herself in a bad light by getting caught up in a date gone wrong — a date set up by Lita. Her date was in possession of hard drugs, and it was all caught on camera. Enter Derek to clean up Emily’s reputation, as her company is on the line for some fancy smancy IPO thing. This scandal needs to go away, and he’s the man for the job. Also, their introduction was less than professional…I’ll just leave this here.
Derek is making waves showing Emily in a more relatable light, and along the way, they fall in love. Obviously. Just when her reputation looks sparkling again, a scandal breaks out that one of Emily’s skin care projects has been falsely dragged and her rival company has swept in to market the skin care as their own. *Gasp* Everything seems to be falling apart and Emily is asked to resign as CEO of her company, and she believes Derek was cheating on her with Lita. She gets the board to buy her out and then gets to work to set things right. Turns out Lita and her brother were the rats, and both Emily and Derek put them each in their place. That was so satisfying to read.
So, yeah her brother and bff sucked. That doesn’t even scratch the surface about her other family members. Namely her mom who was more impressed with Emily’s bank account than she was her actual daughter. It was satisfying to read Emily putting all her family in place at the end.
The romance was more of a slow burn, but there was tension there the entire time. That makes things even more interesting. They had a lot of great banter throughout the book and had chemistry that sizzled between the pages. As far as spice level, I’d give it a 2.5-3 out of 5. It was also cute to see the little epilogue of Emily and Derek. Plus, the two even started their own company together, so they were a power couple for sure.
I devoured this book within 1.5 days because I could not put it down. It may be one of my favorite reads that I’ve read this year, which is why I give it a 5 star rating. Seriously, go read this! It’s on Kindle Unlimited, too.
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