Oh He Just Don't Wanna Be King

Okay, we got the usual tropes: the secret royal, the one-night stand, the surprise baby that daddy doesn't know about, seems pretty cut and dried, right?  Eh, not really.  I do like my Harlequins---as I'm sure you could tell from my previous postings 🤣---and The King's Hidden Heir by Sharon Kendrick seemed like it was gonna be a fun one.

Characters: Emerald Baker, Kostandin.

Premise: After telling her former one-night stand that he's a father, a woman is whisked away to his country where she tries to get him to open his heart to emotions.

Sharon Kendrick is a new author to me and the characters---Emerald and Kostandin---quite the names, don't you think?---were pretty engaging.  Emerald was fun.  She certainly didn't have too much trouble standing up for herself.  When we start out, Emmy and Konstandin met for a tryst which was supposed to be for one night, which was agreed upon.  After he goes back to his country, Emmy finds out she's pregnant and raises their son, Alek, alone.  After five years, she decides it's time to tell him that he's a father, which, he doesn't take too well, and yeah, I get it.  She hid it for five years, I'd be miffed too.  But Konstandin appears to not want to be a father and Emmy considers just leaving things as they are but surprise, surprise, Konstandin proposes a marriage of convenience.

As the story progresses, you learn that Konstandin had never wanted to be king and was planning on abdicating as soon as things were stable in his country---which he was trying to fix because they were in debt due to misappropriation of funds from his father and older brother---and he felt trapped due to Alek being his son.  As it turns out, these feelings come about because his childhood hadn't been happy with his mother cheating on his father and manipulating the man into staying by playing on his emotions and telling him that she loved him, which led to Konstandin deciding that all women are liars. Look, if that had been my childhood, I probably would've thought the same thing.  But because of this, when he brings Emmy to the palace, he just decides that they can enjoy a loveless major, which, my Dude, no! 🤦‍♀️ As you can imagine, this doesn't sit well with Emmy who confronts him after trying to be happy with the proposal, but she can't.  At the end, he learns to love, they get married, and they become the next power couple.  

As stated above, Sharon Kendrick is a new author to me and to be honest, I wasn't really wowed by the story.  It entertained me which is the author's job, but I didn't really feel an emotional connection to Emmy, Alex, or Konstandin, and I felt that Konstandin whined too much about not wanting to be a king.  Still, it was an enjoyable premise and while I won't be adding it to my library, I'd give the book a 5.