Book Review: Wife

Title: Wife
Author: Penelope Sky
Genre: Romance, Dark Romance, Fiction

What It’s About: Damien and Hades are in Morocco for Hades’s twenty-first birthday, and after partying a lot, spending money and having sex, they visit a fortune teller. She ignores Damien at first when he speaks to her, but as he’s about to leave, she tells him to sit down and pay her whatever he thinks is fair. He does, and tells him that he will be a rich man, but that he will fall in love with a girl but she will not survive him. The Fortune Teller than kicks Damien out and speaks to Hades, though he never gives her his name. She doesn’t take his money because she tells him that his money is blood money and she tells him that he will become rich and powerful, but that he will love only one woman, who he will marry and who will give him two sons, but who will not love him back. She calls him by his name, and he doesn’t realize it until after he’s left the tent and is talking with Damien.

Sofia is with her parents at a party in the Tucsan Rose, a hotel that her father opened up, one of the more recent additions to his chain of hotels. She sees a very handsome looking man, who is introduced to her as the banker for the hotel. At some point, she gets out of the party and onto the balcony at the hotel, where the man follows her, tells her his name—Hades—and they talk. There is some intensity to it, and after they finish smoking, he turns to leave when she grabs him and makes out with him. It’s an intense kiss, though he tells her that she is too young for him—her eighteen to his twenty-five—and tells her to make sure that she only lets kings between her legs while she’s out at college.

Four years later, Sofia returns home from Milan, where she has been studying and moves in with her mom, who has now married Gustavo, after Sofia’s father had died. Her mom tells her to get her wild nights and hookups out of her system while she is young, before Sofia settles down and gets married in order to have a husband who takes control of the hotels. Sofia doesn’t believe she needs a husband to be successful at the business—she did go to college to learn how to run a hotel, after all. As a result, she goes behind her mom’s back to talk to Gustavo and asks him to work there—he gives her a concierge job while also letting her shadow him throughout the day on the inner runnings of the hotel. At some point, Hades comes by, and Sofia recognizes him from four years ago though he had changed a bit, in size. Gustavo doesn’t want her in the meeting with Hades, and despite her protests, she ends up just working in the concierge.

Hades and Sofia run into each other at a bar, when she is out with her friend, Esme, who has started hooking up with a guy. Sofia watches as Hades leaves the date that he is with and joins her. They talk in the booth, while the other woman is seething, and Sofia decides to walk away because she doesn’t want to be with someone who has a woman waiting for him. Hades follows her outside, and they make out again, with the same sparks happening as four years ago. Sofia makes it clear to him that she only wants to have sex with him with no strings attached—no relationship.

As a result, Hades gives Sofia his keycard to room 402 in the Tuscan Rose, where they end up having sex several times, and Sofia goes home late, doing the walk of shame in front of her mother. As they continue to have sex in the room, Sofia is happy with the arrangement, because she is living her fantasy of having an affair-like situationship with Hades, but Hades slowly becomes unhappy with this because he would like more. But Sofia is not willing to give him more at all—even getting her to agree to dinner was a challenge, and she didn’t really share much, wasn’t even flustered when Damien joined with his new girl of the week. This irritates Hades.

Sofia continues to work at the concierge and then even attends some meetings with Gustavo to the board, but each time, the men on the board tell her to grab them coffee, and treat her as if she is only good for being an assistant, which she finds strange. At some point, while Sofia is working in the concierge at the hotel, she notices that a bunch of men in suits arrive around 7pm at night, but they don’t look like the typical tourists, or the executives trying to go out with their mistresses. She gets a bit concerned and follows the men into a lounge area, where she cannot find a bartender. One of the men notices her, and asks her if she needs anything, to which she responds that she noticed that there is no bartender and asks if they need anything. The guy tells her that they are good and to run off. She does, sensing that they are dangerous.

During an evening of sex at her apartment, which Sofia had moved into with the salary she was making from being a concierge, she tells Hades about the mafia men that walked in and that Gustavo had gaslit her by telling her that this is not real. Hades goes to Gustavo the following day and tells him that Gustavo needs to tell Sofia the truth because she will figure it out sooner or later, and it will be better if she is told sooner so that she can start digesting it. He also realizes that if he wants to have a relationship with her, he needs to be honest with her, so he has her over for dinner that night, and tells her that he is a bank owner—he really does own a bank—but that he specifically has it in order to launder the money he makes from the criminal organization that he runs. He is a drug dealer and he also kills people that cross him, but he doesn’t deal or work with men who deal in human trafficking. Sofia reacts nonchalantly and tells him that it doesn’t matter to her because they’re just having sex, which breaks his heart because she’s so cold about it.

When Gustavo tells her, however, the truth about how the hotel is funded by criminality and some of the part investors are criminals, Sofia is disillusioned and angry. She ignores her mom, and continues to have sex with Hades despite her feelings, but then her mom shows up at her job, and they go out to lunch. Sofia doesn’t say anything, so her mother starts talking about it and explains to Sofia that this is why she and Sofia’s father want her to get married before she gets the hotel. Sofia reveals to her own mom that she knows that her father had abused her mom, and her mom tells her that he stopped later, which Sofia also knows. In any case, Sofia decides that she wants to continue as a concierge but doesn’t want anything to do with shadowing Gustavo for the time being as she sorts through her feelings around the new information. There’s a Christmas party at the Tuscan Rose, and Hades says hello to Gustavo and Maria, as well as Sofia. Maria, Sofia’s mom, later tells her that Hades is into her, but Sofia kind of brushes it off, though she does end up having sex with him on the balcony during the party. At the end of it, however, Maria orchestrates a situation where Sofia would have to get in the car with Hades on her way out of the party, which Hades is happy about.

She and Hades continue to meet up in his room at the hotel, at her house or at his, and have really good sex, with both of them spending the nights there. Hades also talks to Damien and tells him why Sofia has been frustrating him, to which Damien tells him that he will have to make her fall in love with him, and Hades will have to figure it out himself. Then, one night, after they’eve had some amazing sex, Hades pushes for more and for being exclusive—they have already been having sex without condoms but he wants a relationship—and that has Sofia walking out of the room telling them that they should go their separate ways. He had tried to get her to understand that he would never hurt her, the way her father had hurt her mother, which she had witnessed. This leaves Hades pissed off and when Damien comes by, Hades tells him what had transpired. When Damien asks him what Hades will do about it, he tells Damien that he’s not going to take her back unless she comes begging on her knees for forgiveness.

Sofia doesn’t survive more than a week without Hades, and calls him. He doesn’t pick up but then calls her back, and when she tells him that she misses him but doesn’t admit that she wants him to come over and fuck her, he tells her that this is what she is trying to get him to do, but that he won’t do that—he will give her a second chance if and only if she begs for his forgiveness on her knees. He comes by the hotel the next day and goes straight for his room, and once Sofia is done with her shift, she goes to his room where she begs for him to take her back and also gives him a blow job. He then tells her that she will have to get a bag of lingerie and stay the weekend at his place to continue the conversation.

That is exactly what she does and they have a lot of sex, but then one day she goes out with Esme, her friend, to get drinks, and two men join them after a while. Esme ends up being interested in the guy who sits next to her, but Sofia tells the man sitting next to her that she’s already in a relationship. When they leave, Lance decides to walk her to her apartment, claiming that his apartment is in the same direction and makes a joke that he can either walk behind her like a stalker or they can walk together. They make their way over, and at some point, he tries to kiss her, but she stops him and pushes him away saying that she has a boyfriend. He tells her that the boyfriend doesn’t have to know and they can kiss, but she doesn’t want it, and soon things escalate to Lance choking her with a bag after she bites him, and almost raping her in a side alley. But suddenly, he is gone, and Hades has killed him. Hades takes her home and she realizes that he’s always been right about her not walking home because of what just happened. She does worry about Lance, but Hades tells her not to worry about it because the guy will become a missing case.

Hades also has received a message from Maddox—a rival drug dealer—in which Hades’s drug cook was murdered and hung. Hades is able to finish the product, and hires a new one, but then he and Damien go and find Miles, Maddox’s brother. He has Miles at gunpoint when he calls Maddox, banking on the fact that Maddox will want to save Miles as he loves him, but Maddox says that he won’t do anything, so Hades is forced to kill Miles, while Miles’s wife and two kids are in a different room. Then, there are screams of terror and Hades walks into the room to find that two of the men working for him have started undressing the wife, and he orders them outside where he later shoots them.

They continue having sex, but then during one session, Hades tells Sofia to marry him. She is confused because she has been clear that she did not want to get married and she did not want anything more than sex from the relationship. Besides, she believes that you have to love someone to marry them, and love doesn’t last. So she tells him no, and that she does not love him. Hades gets cold towards her and tells her to get out, which Sofia does do.

Hades gets drunk and has Damien pick him up from the bar, and tells him the next day what happened—and that he will not be giving Sofia another chance. Sofia in the meantime thinks about calling him back but realizes it’s better if they go their separate ways. She also decides that she wants to learn how to run the business so that she can then later get rid of all of the criminals from her business. She goes to Gustavo, and he tells her to cook the books. When Hades comes by to speak with Gustavo, she tries to speak with him, but he tells her to never ever speak to her again. And some time later, she watches as Hades walks out with one of the models from Barsetti Lingerie and takes her in his car, with jealousy rising in her. The Barsettis had come to Tuscan Rose because of their fashion show, and Sofia had helped them set up.

Two years later, Gustavo dies from a heart attack and gets buried. Sofia moves back in with her mother and does her best to run the hotel, though she feels like some of the board members and individual investors still dismiss her, while Hades is working them and she wonders if he’s vying for her role as the owner of the hotel. But, she hasn’t spoken to Hades and any time he needs to speak about hotel business, he speaks with the HR Manager rather than her—they had been keeping their lives separate, though there is hostility.

Finally, during breakfast, her mom tells her that she will not marry again, and that it’s time for Sofia to get a husband. Sofia doesn’t want to do it, but Maria tells her that she either finds a husband and continues to run the business with his help, or she moves somewhere else and doesn’t have anything to do with the business, but the men will not listen to her. And she already tells Sofia that she has someone in mind—Hades Lombardi, who had agreed to marry her, though Sofia tells her mom that they don’t like each other and don’t get along.

Hades had been working on keeping the investors and part owners of the hotel from rebelling against Sofia after Gustavo’s death. He is told that Maria had come in to speak with him, and agrees to see her. She tells him that it is time for her daughter to marry in order to keep the business in the family, because she’s not going to marry at all, and she’s coming to him as her first choice before going anywhere else. Hades agrees to marry Sofia, even agreeing to Maria’s terms—no harming Sofia and that he will get part ownership of the hotel even if nothing works out between them. He tells her that she doesn’t need to go to any other potential suitors as he is the one, and Maria claims that she was right—he has been interested in Sofia for a while.

My Thoughts: Another lovely Penelope Sky story, also set in Italy around the same time frame or just after the time frame of the Barsetti stories from Buttons and Lace. I enjoyed Sofia’s and Hades’s story a lot, along with the steamy romance between them, the tension and just the conversation. It follows Penelope’s typical arch of disinterested parties who enjoy having good sex to at least one of them falling in love with the other and then trying to chase the other or change the other to feel the same way. The one thing that is interesting is that the author this time chose to have the male main character fall in love with the female one while the female main character is cold and disinterested. The prophecy from the fortune teller was a very nice detail and I’m curious to read the next installment in the series to see how it turns out when they’re married and when Sofia falls for him, or at least admits that she has loved him but hasn’t wanted to admit that to herself because of her father. Looking forward to the next one!