Review: emotional storyline
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 16, 2014
ONCE UPON A BILLIONAIRE is the fourth instalment in Jessica Clare’s contemporary, adult, erotic Billionaire Boys Club series focusing on a secret society of six men (all friends and billionaires) who have vowed financial success. This is Viscount Griffin Verdi and Maylee Meriweather’s story-a retelling of the Cinderella classic- who finds her Prince Charming in the guise of the anti-social billionaire businessman Griffin Verdi. Some of Jessica’s storylines in the Billionaire Boys Club series follow a familiar fairy-tale quality.When Griffin’s personal assistant Kip Rothwell becomes ill, Grif finds himself in desperate need of temporary help for his trip abroad to his cousin’s royal wedding-enter Maylee Meriweather-Hunter’s  (Beauty and the Billionaire) assistant and a true southern redneck. What ensues is a building relationship between a repressed billionaire and a young woman whose only sin is to be born into poverty in small town, Arkansas.Griffin is a reluctant royal who gave up his title when he left Bellisime to come to America. At eighteen years of age, Griffin found himself alone in a strange country and never looked back. Now that his cousin Alexandra was about to marry an American actor, he was expected to return home for the royal nuptials -a return he did not welcome. With his long time assistant in seclusion with the chicken pox, Griffin found himself disgusted by the appearance, the voice and the mannerisms of the woman who seems lost in a world of high society and billionaire balls.The relationship between Grif and Maylee is tempestuous at best. Griffin is quick to judge Maylee based on her southern drawal and her unkempt appearance-and to make matters worse, he seems to be attracted to the little nuances that aggravate him the most.  Maylee is a woman who welcomes the challenge and she is the perfect foil for Griffin’s uptight manner but there will come a time, when rejection and betrayal hurt beyond words and Maylee knows it is time to move on.The world building continues throughout the series where we are once reintroduced to the six billionaires and the secret society they call their own. Their loves, their wives and their growing families all play a secondary role in Grif and Maylee’s story. Each of the storylines can be read as a stand alone without any difficulty.ONCE UPON A BILLIONAIRE finds love for bachelor number four but not before harsh words are exchanged; dismissal is a slap in the face; and heartbreak comes at a time when love begins to blossom.  Jessica Clare pulls the reader into an emotional storyline when two social misfits find solace in each other’s arms but a solace that may be built on a rocky foundation.I was gifted a copy