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Double Standards by Judith Mcnaught: 2nd time around
I read Double Standards for the first time in 2001 and quite enjoyed it. I remember I was jonesing for some alpha jerk behavior, and Nick Sinclair served it right up.
Here's the book's synopsis from my review:
"Lauren Danner has a father who is ill with no job and no health insurance. Her father supported her for years, paying for her education, and now she feels the burden of doing her share to help him out. She goes to Detroit to see Philip Whitworth, a distant relative who is an influential businessman. He offers her a job spying on his business competitor and stepson, Nick Sinclair. She is supposed to find out the name of the man who is leaking Whitworth's secrets to Sinclair. If she is successful, he will pay her a huge bonus in addition to her regular salary as a secretary.
Lauren feels uncomfortable with this arrangement, so she deliberately tries to flub her interview so she won't get the job. But on her way out of the building, she takes a spill and turns her ankle. Observing the accident is Nick Sinclair, only Lauren doesn't know this. She only knows that she has met an extraordinarily handsome man named Nick who seems to be some kind of an engineer. Sparks of attraction fly between them, and before you know it, her virginity's history. And then he dumps her. And then she has to show up at work to fill the secretarial position his influence has gotten for her. But now she has a decision to make: does she hate Nick or love him? And what about her spying mission?"
To sum up my review, my first reaction was that, on the plus side, there's Lauren who's naive and gets seduced and more or less dumped by Nick but soldiers on with self-respect. On the minus side, there's Nick who's a huge alpha jerk and a male slut, whose only excuse is that his mother left him with (loving) grandparents when he was a young boy because she wanted to go back to her society life sans first husband's child. On the plus side, the book has a Michigan setting, albeit in a glamorous Detroit setting I can hardly imagine (having lived, if you can call it living, there in the mid 1990's). On the minus side, Nick's groveling is hardly sufficient to make up for his jerkwad behavior to Lauren throughout.
Yesterday I pulled Double Standards out again, hoping to prolong the alpha-jerk glom I started with Simply Irresistible. I had only a vague memory of the storyline and was looking forward to enjoying it almost as if it were a first-time read. But very soon into it, I realized that wasn't really going to happen. Because this book is just too straightforward and predictable. Black and white. It's about beatiful people who know they're beautiful. Lauren is gorgeous and good. Nick is gorgeous and bad. Lauren is in a situation in which she feels vulnerable, but her vulnerability is due entirely to external factors - her father's illness and precarious financial situation. And she chooses to take entire responsibility for her family when she really doesn't have to. Which kind of makes her a savior/martyr. Her quest to find a well-paid position is remarkably short and easy, with one good-looking man after another offering her secretarial jobs, executive secretary jobs. Beautiful people do have an easier time of it in the job market, but this is ridiculous.
While the plot is ostensibly about industrial espionage, it doesn't play out that way. Lauren is too good to spy. Well, she's good enough to root out a spy for her family [more nobility], but once she finds good work with a nice boss under a super hot executive boss with whom she fall in love, her loyalty kicks in [more nobility] and, of course, she can't participate in any way in what Whitworth is paying her to do. That would be wrong. Too bad that Whitworth and McNaught conspire to make her look like a black-hatted backstabbing heartless bitch to Nick who, of course, immediately judges her to be as bad as his heartless mother and tosses her out on her shapely behind. Can he be blamed for his reaction, the reader is invited to wonder, when Lauren looks so very, very guilty?
My answer would be: yes. He never gives her any kind of opportunity to explain and reacts completely emotionally. This has to bode ill for their future together, even if he manages to patch things up between them in the now. Who wants to be with a guy who feels he has the right to be judge, jury, and executioner to anyone who's done him wrong or appears to have done him wrong? Grudge holding is so unattractive, but revenge plotting, that's pretty adolescent. Move on dot org already, Nick. Everything's not about you.
So there you go: same book, two reactions, same reader. Sometimes it's all about timing, I guess.