A Review of The Patron: A Forbidden Billionaire Romance (Broken Slipper Series Book 1) by Vivian Wood

This is the first billionaire romance I’ve read by Vivian Wood, and it won’t be the last. Vivian Wood writes about flawed alpha males and troubled women who captivate them, and she delivers that dynamic well in this billionaire-ballerina romance.

Let’s meet Calum Fordham, a billionaire, former ballet dancer, and the owner of Indica Tech and Indica Charities. He is ruggedly handsome, sometimes ruthless, but undeniably smitten with Kaia Walker, a struggling ballet dancer with dreams of dancing for the New York Ballet. To make ends meet and pay back her father’s debt ($200,000) for her ballet academy training, she moonlights as Cerise at Club X, a strip club.

As a stripper, Kaia is confident and poised, but shudders when her father criticizes her and leaves hate filled voicemails. She also struggles to defend herself at the ballet academy against mean-spirited ballerinas like Manon. Thankfully, her ballerina friends Eric and Ella stand up for her. Anyway, Kaia is thrilled when Calum offers to be her patron, but things take an unexpected turn when Calum is asked to stage manage a production of Sleeping Beauty and finds Kaia auditioning for a role.

After the initial shock of seeing each other at rehearsals, Calum and Kaia carefully navigate their arrangement: he wines and dines her, gives her explicit instructions on where to meet him, what to wear, and how to act around him. Everything seems to be going well until Honor, a ballerina Calum has been lusting after threatens to expose his relationship with Kaia, complicating his role as the show’s producer and Kaia’s part in it. To make matters worse, Kaia’ father tries to strangle her during a dress rehearsal when she refuses to help him out of his debt with the mob.

Overall, this is a fast-paced and steamy read. The characters are flawed but well-developed. The ballet elements are done really well, the dialogue is realistic, and the sex scenes are sizzling. Calum and Kaia’s backstories add depth to their characters, revealing their brokenness. However, the twists at the end will leave readers yearning for the next installment.

Two thumbs up! Great read!

Rating: 4 stars

Some of my favorite lines:

I pause. “A patron?”

She looks at me with a sigh. “Yes. A patron. Someone that will pay for my services. Someone with a fat wallet that will take me out of here.”

I bite my lip. “Pay for you to strip privately, you mean?”

She huffs out a laugh. “No, honey. Any man can get that here for a few hundred dollars. A patron gets you any way he wants it, as often as he feels like it. In exchange, he pays for an apartment, a car service, all the fancy clothes you could want…” She looks at herself in the mirror, leaning close to examine her reflection. “I’ve heard that a few girls even married their patrons.

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