Bertrice Small – Sudden Pleasures

The third book in the Channel series), published June 5, 2007.
Genre: erotica
Cover: nice
re-read for the third time.



Ashley Kinsbrough has everything a woman could want: a successful business, close friends, and a satisfying sex life in the Channel – a secret women-only network that allows viewers to live out their wildest fantasies. She isn’t interested in marriage – until she learns that she’s in danger of losing her inheritance. She also isn’t interested in self-made millionaire Ryan Mulcahy, a handsome man with the body of a Celtic warrior and the face of an Italian model. But then he proposes a marriage of convenience, since he is in a bind of his own. Ashley knows her life will be perfect with Ryan, with expectations for companionship only ... never passion or love.
Still, sudden pleasures are not quite what you expect them to be ...


Okay, this blurb is not really conform the book. Or not at all. Ashley Kinsbrough is a rich heiress, but she has also created her own successful business from scratch. Unfortunately, as she started it with some capital from her grandfather, it is considered part of his estate. And if she does not get married before she is 35, she will lose it all to his last girlfriend and her idiotic cause.
She has tried to get married three times before, but three times before the wedding was cancelled at the last moment. Her first fiancée was gay and ran off with the best man, her second fiancée was a famous sportsman and a a sex addict, who died while having sex in Las Vegas, and her third fiancée was a con man, only after her money. So no wonder Ashley lost her trust in herself in finding a good man to marry. She clearly has no taste in men.
Her lawyers have tried to get rid of the clause in her grandfather’s testament, but to no avail.
But her lawyers cousin has a client with the same problem. Ryan Mulcahy needs to marry before he is 40, or the business he has build goes to his 5 sisters. They have already lined up a buyer for it too.

So Clara (Nora’s friend) suggests that bringing them together in a marriage of convenience will solve both their problems. And when Ashley and Ryan meet, they are immediately attracted to each other. They like each other, they have a lot in common, having both build up their own business, and they are both workaholics. And it is nowhere stated that they have to marry for love, or stay married. So they agree to a marriage of convenience for two years, and then they will see what happens.

But they both like each other, and quickly fall in lust. But Ashley refuses to give in to that lust until after the marriage. After all, she has the Channel as an escape. She also really likes Ryan’s mother and his youngest sister. And so they plan their wedding together, but Ashley refuses to go through with another big white wedding. The previous 3 disasters were expensive enough.


This is a fun story, how Ashley and Ryan fall in love, and how they thwart his money grabbing sisters. Their father left them enough money in his will, but they burned through it recklessly, and now they want more. They don’t care that Ryan build the business on the modest one their father had started.
Ashley has no family left at all, she has her butler and his wife, who is her housekeeper/cook, and who have practically raised her after her parents died.

Ashley and Ryan are both capable and practical and mature people, and I enjoyed watching them fall for each other. Of course there are hot love scenes in this book, but I really enjoy this story. Marriage of convenience is one of my favourite tropes.

I really do recommend this series.

9 stars.

© 2015 Reviews by Aurian