“Wicked Beautiful is wicked sexy, wicked emotional, and one of my top reads!” ~ NYT Bestselling Author Jennifer ProbstLife coach and best-selling author Victoria Price has it all: a successful career, fabulous friends, a fantastic penthouse in Manhattan. What she doesn’t have—and doesn’t want—is a husband. Fifteen years ago her high school flame broke her heart so badly she swore she’d never love … swore she’d never love again.
Drop-dead sexy restauranteur and infamous playboy Parker Maxwell has only three rules for the women he dates: no questions about his past, no expectations for the future, and no spending the night. When he meets Victoria, however, he’s willing to break his own rules if it means sating the explosive desire she arouses in him. What he doesn’t know is that the alluring Victoria Price used to be the mousy Isabel Diaz, the girl he deflowered and dumped long ago.
Presented with a perfect opportunity for revenge, Victoria decides the game is on. But when her connection with Parker proves more than just skin deep, she has to make a choice: continue with her plan for payback, or risk her career, her reputation, and her heart by taking a second chance on love?
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Wicked Beautiful by J.T Geissinger
This book could be classified as a Contemporary Romance with multiple elements of humor and suspense. A second chance romance story if you will.
An intriguing, original, and engaging storyline with an amazing cast of characters.
The heroine was a self-made strong woman of Mexican-American origins ( I cannot say anything else because I don’t want to spoil it), whose character I greatly admire.
The hero was a good Texas man amending his life and attitude for a mistake he made in his teens.
J.T is a new author to me and I am very happy to have found her writing, I am looking forward to read book 2 in this series.
Kudos to the author for making the heroine a strong Latina, her best friend a proud Black woman, and her assistant a badass Hacker.
What a book! This story is unlike any I have ever read. This plot is genius and these characters wrap you up in a hurry. Victoria and Parker are incredibly intense. The St. Thomas scene is pure perfection and how that scene ends is just mindblowing. Excellent story. A must read.
Haunting, revenge-driven love story that will not leave you unmoved
You will either love this book or hate it, feel deeply disturbed by it, find it hilariously funny at times and heartwrenchingly sad at others, but it will not leave you unmoved.
My own feeling towards this story can be best described as conflicted.
Synopsis: After being deeply hurt and betrayed by her first love, Victoria Price not only changes her appearance and name, but turns her whole life around. Driven by her own tragic past she has made it her life’s mission to help and empower other women to be just as hard and ruthless and successful as her. She has everything in her life, except and husband and family.
Dining out with a girlfriend she comes face to face with her first love Parker Maxwell who has become a successful restauranteur and famous playboy. When, not recognizing her, he hits on her she sees the perfect opportunity for revenge. She plans to seduce him, make him fall in love with her and then to dump him.
The premise of this story sounded very exciting, tragic first love and revenge tale, but of course it gets complicated once the two main protagonists get involved and start to have feelings for each other.
But, despite the fact that the story is well-written, fast-paced, emotional and gripping, I had some problems with it.
Reservation No 1: The skewed feminist perspective
The novel quite rightly illuminates the injustice of the different perception of attributes when applied to men and women. If a man is aggressive, ambitious and successful he is viewed in a positive light. When a woman displays the same attributes she is considered a cold bitch. So Victoria becomes just as hard and uncompromising as any man whereas the feminist perspective would be to question those attributes in the first place and try to envision a society where attributes like empathy, the ability to work in a team, to share responsibility (and success) would be/become just as important. By becoming more single-minded and focused than any man Victoria reinforces a paradigm that feminists have long since questioned.
Reservation No 2: Victoria is not all that likable
The story is told in first person narration from changing points of view (by Victoria and Parker), but with a large imbalance between the two, so we get what felt like 80% POV of Victoria and much less from Parker. Also, when Victoria is already involved romantically with Parker and he opens up to her, she continues to hold back and to think about how to hurt him. Her inner voice is quite vicious. This is in stark contrast to Parker, who – even though he wants to get in her pants from the start – is basically a decent guy, what we as readers seem to realize long before Victoria, who has let her whole outlook be poisoned by bitterness. The contrast is made even more pronounced when we learn that what Victoria saw as Parker’s betrayal was actually him trying to protect her and that he was as much a victim of the machinations of their families as her, and that in everything he has done since he was trying to atone for what happened to her. So basically I felt she didn’t deserve him and that is not a good feeling for the female protagonist and identification figure to evoke.
Reservation No 3: the sidekick (sort of minor)
I really liked Darcy, even though she is a touch over-drawn. She is black, loud, big and a famous food blogger (that’s how they end up at Parker’s restaurant in the first place). What bothered me about her was that she just reminded me so strongly of Janet Evanovich’s Lula, down to her mannerisms and her tendency to press her not inconsiderable figure into tight dresses of garish colors.
Also, the ending feels a bit contrived, but it was clear from the start that it would be difficult to resolve the revenge plot satisfyingly. But despite all these reservations it’s a well-written, emotionally gripping tale, so I give it 4+ stars.
I pretty much binge read this book until the very end, and then something happened (I say something because I’m not really sure what it was) and with 1 chapter and the epilogue left, I was less excited to finish, but I did. Wrapped up fine. I really liked the story but the final confrontation wasn’t much of a confrontation. I think that’s actually what disappointed me.
Well THAT was a wild ride I’m glad I went on. This book had me riveted. Comedy, romance, tragedy all rolled into one, it kept me engaged and longing for bedtime, which is about the only time I can read undisturbed. At times it was frustrating, “Oh come on! Really?!?” Seeming to just string out too long, but then finally, the conclusion and it was a good one. I’m glad I stumbled onto this one.
I discovered this author from her Slow Burn series, and since I enjoyed them so much, I’ve decided to download all her books into my Kindle. So I guess I’m going backwards visiting her earlier works. And once again, I fell in love with her beautiful story about Victoria (Isabel) and Parker. It’s one of a few romance novels that the heroine was actually wealthier than the hero 🙂 Victoria was a successful, independent and sassy woman whose heart was broken to pieces after her first and only love left her without a trace when she was 17 and pregnant! Parker grew up in a privilege family and later on became a successful businessman in his own rights. He realized there was something in Victoria that he felt familiar with, but never could he imagine she was also his first and only love Isabel. Fate threw them together again in their cross paths 15 years later, sparks flew and passion heated. They both could not resist their fall for each other. I cried when Parker unraveled his side of the story, and it was then that Victoria realized all she had believed in had been just one misunderstanding after another. The story was unfolded beautifully and unexpectedly, it kept going and going and I just could not put it down! I felt my happy tears at the end when they finally got to meet their daughter in person, though I wish there were more to it 🙂 This book also gave a glimpse into the initial interaction between Tabby and Connor, which I already found very intriguing and could not wait to delve into the their story next. I highly recommend this author, all her books have been a joy to read.
Wicked Games indeed! LOL
I loved everything about this story. From the premise to the plot to the characters to …. everything
This was a very unique second chance story with a not so overused twist. I like different. I like daring. I like bold. And this story had all of that in spades!
The story also had just enough twist and turns and ‘wait, whaaat?’ moments to keep you interested and glued to it! And don’t get me started on the chemistry! **YIKES**
There’s a little bit of everything in here, but it all works. The story is passionate as much as it is heart-warming and you won’t be able to stop yourself from rooting for both Victoria and Parker from page one!
OMG this book was SO, SO GOOD. I have been in such a reading rut lately with mediocre book after mediocre book that I was beginning to think it was just me. I mean there is no way I could pen my own romance book so who am I to judge but then this gem of a book lands in my lap and I realize, YES! There really are some darn good authors out there and Geissinger is one of them. And let me tell you she doesn’t disappoint in Wicked Beautiful. She proves to me once again what an amazing and talented author she is in writing such a captivating story as well as heartfelt characters.
The Plot
We first meet Victoria Price, or Queen B (for bitch) as she is called, who is at the top of her game in the self-help coaching circuit empowering women to embrace their inner bitch. Fifteen years after having her teenage heart broken, she once again comes face to face with Parker Maxwell — the boy she first loved and the one who destroyed her heart. The kicker is that Victoria is unrecognizable to Parker because she has completely reimagined herself with a new look and new name yet the sparks still fly. The unexpected meeting kicks off a scheming plan for Victoria to enact revenge on the unsuspecting Parker but as we know the best laid plans don’t always come true.
The Characters
I really, really liked both main characters to this story. Victoria is a woman who can go toe to toe with the best of them but doesn’t apologize for what others may call her bitchy attitude. Yet beneath this tough exterior is a woman who’s spent years running from a hurt that she’s never truly healed from. What’s worse is she doesn’t count on running into the cause of this hurt, Parker, and having him see through her bullshit as they grow close again.
“I have just been seen. Not looked at, but seen.”
Despite launching her revenge plan, there are moments when she truly let’s go and you can see the connection, they still have with one another, but then she would remember and pull away. Victoria’s back and forth had the potential to get really old or redundant in the story, but instead Geissinger writes her in a way where you can completely understand her feelings of being swept away yet again but also of being scared of how easily she can succumb to her feelings for Parker. It was done so brilliantly.
Parker, I adored.
He was confident, patient, romantic, endearing and a man who knows what he wants. I loved how he continually surprised Victoria (and me!) in his words and actions.
“No more bullshit. No more games. No more of this Luciano Mancari crap. I want you so fucking badly, I’ll do almost anything to have you, and I think you want me the same way. But I won’t beg. I won’t be lied to. And I won’t be led around by my balls. I want it only if it’s real. So, decide right now if you can give me real. Yes or no.”
I love it when authors give us such wonderful, secondary characters to enjoy in their books. Even if we don’t see or hear from them often, when written well they can stay with you long after the book as well. That is the case with Tabby and Connor in this book. The back-and-forth between them in the last chapters was just priceless and I cannot wait to devour the second book in the series.
Tabby to Connor:
“I’m good jarhead, but I will never, ever be nice. Nice is for preschool teachers, politicians, and cowards. I’m real, and I don’t give one single fuck about conforming to your misogynist ideas about how women should act, so you fucking hand over that motherfucking note right now, or I swear to the Goddess I will rain down a shit storm of such epic proportions on you, you’ll think your name is Noah.” Connor looks over at me. “It is inappropriate for me to have a boner right now? ‘Cause my dick is so hard, it might actually explode.”
More to the Story than the Relationship
It’s a gift when a book also expands your mind or explores a topic that makes you just stop and think. Penny Reid’s books often do this for me but Geissinger’s does as well. In Wicked Beautiful, Geissinger’s anthems for claiming your own power really resonated with me. I loved the anecdotes she includes when Victoria is on stage to bring home a message of female empowerment and it’s done without feeling like you’re being force fed some standard lines.
“You already have all the power you need, but you’ve been giving it away. You’ve been trading it, bartering it, squandering it, because your need to be liked is stronger than your need to honor yourself. Every time you don’t speak up if you’re disrespected, every time you say ‘yes’ when you should say ‘no,’ every time you put someone else’s needs or desires ahead of your own, you give away your power. And what do you get in return?”…. “Frustration. Resentment. Anger.”
“Bitches never suffer from depression! They don’t suffer from anything, in fact, because if it makes them unhappy, they move on! They don’t try to change it, or whine about it, or spend hours with their girlfriends analyzing why. They simply open their hands and let it go!”
AMEN SISTER!!
So really, you have to read this book. Though I probably could have done without the recurring churro and kitty references to certain body parts, the book was so good I can let them slide.
Pick up this read. You will not be disappointed in this second chance romance.
Revenge is a dish better served cold and Victoria Price is just the woman to do it. Exacting revenge on the man, one Parker Maxwell, will be bittersweet. This is a tale of young love lost, deception, mistrust, and eventually forgiveness as well as redemption. Victoria and Parker are incredibly likeable characters and their passion is palpable. Two secondary characters, Tabby and Darcy, add a comedic flare.
Sometimes I wish J.T. Geissinger would write shorter books! Because when I pick up one of her books, my real life stops. I go to the world she has created and get wrapped up in her characters’ lives. I try to put the book down and do something else, but am only mildly successful—perhaps doing the dishes or making a call—before I find the book back in my hand. Just one more chapter becomes two, three, four chapters because each chapter has a cliffhanger that has me at the edge of my seat.
She writes in such a descriptive way that I can completely picture the scenes and characters in my mind. Her heroines are strong; her heroes thoughtful, considerate and vulnerable. Her supporting characters are always colorful and quirky. They add humor to plots that are often deep, complex, and filled with high levels of tension. The plot is often intense and leaves you thinking about the book long after you’ve finished the last page. It’s 24 hours since I finished this book and I’m still thinking about Parker, the hero, and everything he did to try to gain the heroine’s trust and tear down the walls she had built around herself.
One warning: some scenes between hero and heroine are sizzling hot and a bit graphic, but she uses those scenes to build a stronger relationship between the characters. Her books are about the hero and heroine overcoming obstacles and solving problems so they can eventually have their happily ever after. But the road is always bumpy and there are always some unpredictable twists and turns in that road! I definitely recommend this and all her romantic suspense books!
If you like suspenseful romance and you haven’t read J.T. Geissinger’s books, you really should pick up one of them and plan to spend some time losing yourself in a page-turning story!
Struggled to read but loved the story line.
I could NOT put this book down!!!
Just when I thought I had things figured out, the story went another direction.
I loved everything about this book!
Wow this is not what I expected at all, it was brilliant and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. I loved this book!
I loved Wicked Beautiful. It was my first book by this author and I loved how different and unexpected it was. I can’t wait to read more of her work!
Victoria is a strong heroine who pulled herself up from heartbreak and made herself a success teaching others how to do the same. When she runs into Parker and he doesn’t recognize her as the teen he abandoned, she plots revenge for her broken heart.
“Hate will devour you. Anger, no matter how righteous it feels, is a straight, short path to hell. Only forgiveness will set you free. Only forgiveness can heal your scars. Forgiveness not only for those who’ve wronged you but also for yourself.”
Wicked Beautiful is very entertaining. It is sexy, witty, and sweet with emotional depth. I listened to most of this on audiobook and the narrator, Melissa Moran did an amazing job. I’ll definitely be looking for more of her work!
“I want to know all the dark places in you,” he whispers vehemently, his arms like a vise. “I want to be the one who has the key that unlocks all your bolted doors and chases away all the monsters you keep hidden behind them. I want to be the light inside your darkness. I want to be your rock and your safety net, the soft place you can fall.”
Love JTs books. All of them. She has a fan for life. Her books are non stop fabulous. 5 stars is definitely not enough !!
4.5 stars, what a good, good story.
The plot is very promising, I cried along with the Victoria, although from the moment Parker told her about his past, I can already tell what’s going on, I still enjoyed this story. I love the fact that Victoria’s such a badass and Parker’s simply refuse to give up. But one thing that irked me, that also become one thing that prevent me from giving this book 5 stars, is the fact that there’s no closure between Victoria and Parker, with their own past. You know what I mean when you finished this book. I want Victoria to face her past, but in the end she’s still running from it and for that it’s too bad.
But overall what a story! Look forward to read Tabby’s story! OMG!
Edge of your seat, keep you wondering, amazing read.
If this book wasn’t funny you would not have been able to read it for the sad story that it was. But the author was fabulous and I would love to read another book by her. The story was well written and very believable.
Loved the strong woman aspect. Characters were wonderful! Loved the book. Couldn’t wait to read the 2nd book!
Loved the hero. Heroine (and the premise of her back story) was irritating. Great secondary characters – and the second book Wicked Sexy – was AWESOME!