Malicious Compliance
When what he thinks he wants is extremely NOT what he wants... that's amore
Malicious compliance is so hard to pull off and such a specific micro trope and every time it appears in a book I get stupid excited. Because it requires a 100% commitment from someone with a martyr complex as strong as their spine, a tyrant of a love interest who fell for said martyr complex person prior to them martyring themselves, and the tyrant needs to blink first. A lot of times, this microtrope resolves where the heroine (the martyr, usually) is petty for like two seconds and then caves immediately to any pressure… which is not malicious compliance! Real malicious compliance deserves to be rewarded- they deserve to WIN! Ok big boy, you want to be the boss? These are my boundaries? Got it. Gonna live and die by these boundaries. Oh, you hate that? Sounds like a you problem!
The Marquess Wins a Wife by Aydra Richards. Lizzie Talbot is struggling to raise her rowdy collection of siblings due to their drunkard of a father constantly wandering off (and usually with the money, when there’s even money to wander off with in the first place). The house is falling apart around her and she’s barely getting by… so when her younger sister is ruined and left without options, Lizzie’s pushed to the brink and heads off the bring the prospective groom to heel at gunpoint.
Unfortunately, she abducts and then maybe kinda shoots the wrong guy and now they’ve got a malingering marquess in their crumbling manner house in addition to no groom for a ruined sister, no prospects for the rest of them, and barely any money for bread.
The Marquess of Ashworth is pissed, naturally, and wants revenge… but then he wants more than revenge. Classic stuff. I’ll be honest, this is a book I remember really loving and I’ve tagged it malicious compliance but I don’t 100% know what part was malicious compliance. Maybe the Marquess, I remember him being real petulant and annoying for a while. Who knows. My tagging system is infallible even if my mind is not! And this is a great book besides, so do yourself a favor and read it.
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥
Scandalous Desires by Elizabeth Hoyt. This is book 3 of the Maiden Lane series, all of which are really fun in their own rights, but the malicious compliance aspect catapulted this one to the top of my personal list. So we’ve met this heroine (Silence, lol) in the previous books- she’s the recently widowed (as of the end of the last book or perhaps the beginning of this one) sister of some previous characters. But before she was widowed (you gotta read these in order, my friends, I promise it’s worth the ride) there was An Incident with a river pirate named Mickey in exchange for his help.
Well Mickey now needs his own help, because he’s got a daughter he needs help with and no woman to do the helping while he runs his huge criminal enterprise. So naturally he kidnaps that hot captain’s wife (now hot captain’s widow) as a nanny. And her reaction is to stage a hunger strike because he’s like you only get to eat if you come downstairs and eat with me all polite-like, and she, all polite-like, tells him she’d rather starve.
To make it even better, the other people in the pirate compound try to sneak her food and she refuses on principal. Now this is the stubborn kind of wench I am looking for! Eventually, Mickey realizes he’s kidnapped way more than he’s bargained for. And, uh oh, he LIKES it.
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥
Rain of Shadows and Endings by Melissa K. Roehrich. The first of a truly epic quartet of books that are not afraid to Go There. What you need to know is this: there’s the Legacy, beings descended from a god’s bloodline who are in charge, there’s humans, who work and mostly keep to themselves, and then there’s the Fae, who the Legacy can use to recharge their magic and who have their own magic besides. And every time a Legacy heir comes of age, they get to choose a powerful Fae as a Source, essentially a portable sentient battery pack.
Tessalyn Asura has had a rough time of it, but thought she was unremarkable. So when the Legacy heir to the mysterious Arius bloodline, Theon, chooses her as his source… things go from pretty bleak to somehow worse very quickly. She fights the forced bond at every turn, so he fights back harder because he has A Plan but doesn’t deign explain it to her.
And then, the few times she tries not to fight, to comply (but in a way she knows will piss him off because he only wants her to comply totally in public and to be herself and just trust him in private), he gets absolutely pissed. This first book is a battle of wills as one side realizes he doesn’t hold as many cards as he thought and the other side realizes she’s got more power than she realized.
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥
Next time, I’ll be recommending books where one or more protagonist is responsible for raising their siblings to some degree (which you got an advance of with The Marquess Wins a Wife).
What should I be reading next? Let me know in the comments!
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Malicious compliance is such a great trope and I haven't thought of it that way before. I don't have any books that come to mind for it but it does feel like something that's more common in historical
I guess Aydra Richards must like that trope of a protagonist raising siblings, because she did it again in His Reluctant Lady, which was great, first one by her that I've read.