The Marriage Trap by Jennifer Probst
Marriage to a Billionaire, Book 2
Gallery Books
Contemporary
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1751-7
Reviewed by Vanessa




Michael Conte’s younger sister is engaged to wed.  However, because of the traditional Italian family she is from, she is unable to see this dream come true until her older brother is bound in matrimony first!  Michael has no desire to marry, so he instead concocts a plan to pull the wool over his family’s eyes.  Yet, Michael is soon caught in a trap of his own making.

Fashion photographer, Maggie Ryan has been searching for something more in her life.  She wants that someone special, but she has a problem tearing down her inner walls due to a traumatic experience in her life years ago.  The one time there was a crack in her shell, she got hurt because she believed “he” was in love with her BFF/sister-in-law.  However, now “he” is offering her a deal of steering clear of her BFF if she will fake being his wife for a week.  How can Maggie resist protecting her friend’s marriage from this hot Italian?

The Marriage Trap was a brisk and light read which brought a bit more of the contemporary take-no-prisoners woman of today into this story.  For a while, I thought perhaps Michael would be your typical alpha Italian of the HP categories, but he wasn’t.  He didn’t seem to control as much as I would have expected, but then he really wasn’t playing in their leagues.  At times, I felt that The Marriage Trap strayed from the meanings that other novels have given to Italians and this annoyed me some.  I liked both Michael and Maggie, but I didn’t feel that burning passion between them, and I was disappointed that I didn’t.  Perhaps if I had read the first book, I might have been drawn more to them.

The Marriage Trap claimed that Michael is an honest person, but I’m wondering if it was more sarcasm than anything.  It didn’t help that Michael seemed very contradictory several times in The Marriage Trap and this caused me to not fully engage in The Marriage Trap, as well.  I also didn’t like that Maggie made so much of some things, but then she quickly forgot them in favor of something else.