Stepbrother Billionaire--Colleen Masters

 You ever read a book where you are in the first two chapters and you swear you have read it before. That’s how I felt reading Stepbrother Billionaire. It was so similar to Stepbrother Dearest that I was almost stumped and thought they were part of a step brother series.

That being said I read this book before I realized that there was hype about this exact issue. While there are many people that may disagree with the similarities, the basic plot structure is VERY similar.

Children forced to live together and become “step-siblings”
They “hate” each other but are really harboring deep romantic feelings

Boy and Girl get into relationship
Boy’s momma-drama pulls him away from the girl
~A few years later~

Boy and Girl run back into each other
They try to deny the return of feelings…

…And Fail.

Sure the details change, the characters are different and so are the situations that they are living in. But this plot line is the same in both books.

Now, away from the drama and back to the book. Where I found my issues was mainly in the adult storyline. Emerson is exactly that, an adult, while Abby is still acting like the teenager that she was all those years before. Emerson has found something he loves and has a passion while Abby is just sort of drifting. I think that the author wrote this this way to show that she has never really needed to take responsibility since she was living off of her grandparents wealth but I think it failed and just made her look almost selfish or naive. There is a fine line to what she was trying to attempt and I think it was just shy of doing so. It just made any character development that happened null and void.

Speaking of characters and not developing, Abby’s grandparents she had said were “rich but good people”.  That’s the biggest load of malarkey I have ever read. The wedding scene and after (can you say PLOT TWIST!) they were the most condescending and judgmental people in the entire book. So don’t even get me started on the later years when they are still the same closed off assholes that they were before. They just saw Emerson as a bad influence and a bad boy, even though he was now a hardworking, business “owning”, sexy billionaire. (I put owning in quotes because he runs a branch or division of a company but owning sounded better that ‘business running’.)

This book also seems like it was supposed to be a sexier book, but there wasn’t much that I would call sexy. The sex scenes weren’t that amazing—not that I read it for the sex scenes but when you have that hunk of a man on the cover I would expect something spicier than Ketchup. Okay, maybe it was like Mild Salsa spicy, but still not spicy enough for my liking.

I had high hopes but they were left dashed and that is not even because of the coincidences between the two Stepbrother books.  The characters here were hard for me to like making the book hard to get into and enjoy. Then there were the challenges that latter half of the book faced.