Beneath This Man

I finished This Man on a Sunday night and started this one on Monday, which is probably how these books are meant to be read. The first volume ends with Ava O'Shea walking out of Jesse Ward's penthouse at Lusso while he is drunk and shouting. I wanted to know whether she would actually stay gone. Beneath This Man, published by Forever in 2013, picks up five days later and answers that question almost at once. The speed of the answer is both the pleasure and the problem of the book.

This is the second of the series, 544 pages in the edition I read (ISBN 9781455578344), and it does not stand alone. If you have not read This Man, the opening chapters read like a fever dream with half the cast missing. Malpas assumes you remember the club, the flat, the brother, the friend, the argument in the rain. She does not recap much, and the first fifty pages are bumpy because of it. Start at book one or not at all.

Five Days, and a Call from Sam

Ava is in pieces. She is staying with Kate, or rather hiding in Kate's flat and avoiding her, because Kate will ask questions and Ava has no answers that make her look sane. She dreads her brother Dan coming home. She goes to work and stares at fabric samples and forgets to answer emails. Her voice in these chapters is flat in a way that feels deliberate, a woman going through the motions of a life she was proud of a week earlier. Some of the funniest lines in the book are here, small jokes about tea and phone batteries, and they land harder because she is miserable.

Then Sam turns up. Sam is Jesse's friend, and he is worried in a way that is not quite panic but close. Jesse has gone missing. He is in a bad way. Ava says no, then puts her coat on, and the "no" is not convincing to anyone, least of all her. That is the pattern of the entire novel: she refuses, he collapses, she goes.

At Lusso, the concierge Clive tries to stop her and fails. She has been here before, and the building remembers her. What she finds on the terrace is Jesse unconscious and naked among empty vodka bottles. He is not dramatically beautiful in that moment. He is a mess, cold, and hard to wake. John, Jesse's security man, and Sam help move him inside. Nobody calls an ambulance. That detail tells you what kind of world this is. Money handles things quietly, without paperwork or paramedics, and Ava accepts it because she is already inside the logic of Jesse's life.

I put the book down after that scene and thought about how good Malpas is at the ugly reveal. She lets the romance fantasy go sour in the sun, with the bottles catching the light. A weaker book would have made him heroic even in collapse.

The Terms Are Still His

Jesse wakes and the reunion happens quickly. Too quickly, maybe, but the novel is honest about why. Ava has spent five days rehearsing her anger and loses it the moment he touches her. He is tender, then furious, then tender again inside a single afternoon. She stays. She does not move back in, exactly, but she is there, and being there is the same thing in his mind.

The terms have not changed. He wants her at The Manor and at Lusso. He wants to know where she is. He wants her phone answered. He wants her to want the life he has built, which is a life of very expensive rooms with very few doors. Ava negotiates small things and loses the large ones. She keeps her job and her flat for now, and those two facts are the only bargaining power she has, though the book never uses that phrase.

The Manor is the sex club Ava discovered at the end of book one, and it remains the sore spot. Jesse's involvement there, his history with the women who pass through it, and the members who know him are all sources of shame for Ava and defiance for him. She cannot decide whether the club is a business, a habit, or a personality. He will not explain it in a way that lets her rest. Malpas does not give us a tour of the rules or the rooms here, and I am glad of that, because the vagueness is more unsettling than a schematic would be. What matters is that Ava is asked to be a good sport about a place that makes her feel small.

Sarah is still around, his friend and employee, still capable of getting under Ava's skin with a look. Coral, an ex, reappears, and the scenes with her are brief but poisonous. Then there is Ruth Quinn, a new interior design client with a house renovation that puts Ava under real strain. The job is a good excuse to get Ava out of the penthouse, and the pressure of it, the late nights and the client's demands, starts to feel tied to the wider mess around Jesse in ways Ava cannot yet name. I liked Ruth as a character because she is one of the few people in the book who wants something from Ava that has nothing to do with Jesse.

What He Finally Tells Her

The first volume dangled two questions: how old Jesse is, and what happened to him. Here both get answers. He is in his late thirties, older than Ava by more than a decade, and the reveal is deliberately anticlimactic, a fact he has been hiding for no reason except that hiding things is what he does. The relief Ava feels is followed immediately by the realization that he lied by omission for months.

He also explains the large scar on his torso, and he talks about his estranged family in Marbella. The family material is thin but it does the work the plot needs. It shows a boy who learned that love was conditional, that money could substitute for presence, and that leaving first was safer than being left. I did not find it a full explanation. I found it a credible one, which is different.

Drink runs under all of it. Jesse has hidden how much he drinks, and Ava has been willing not to count. Now she counts. She finds bottles, smells it on him, watches him switch from charming to cruel in the time it takes to pour. The question the novel keeps circling is whether she can live with a man who lies about drinking, and Malpas is smart enough not to answer it with a single conversation. She can, for a while. That is the horror of it.

The Pills in the Bathroom Cabinet

Then the book does something that genuinely shocked me. Ava discovers that Jesse has been hiding her birth control pills. He wants to tie her to him with a pregnancy. Not as a fantasy he mentions once, but as a plan he has been quietly executing.

This is the major betrayal of the novel, and it is worse than the shouting or the tracking or the jealousy, because it is premeditated and intimate. He has been inside her medicine cabinet and inside her body's future at the same time. Ava confronts him. She is furious, and for a few pages the book is too, which is the right instinct. The scene where she realizes what he has done is the best-written sequence in the whole thing, all cold clarity after pages of heat.

The problem is what happens next. The novel treats the deception as control, which it is, and then it lets the romance pull them back together before the weight of it has been felt. There is apology, there is explanation, there is sex, and the plot moves on. I wanted at least a hundred pages of consequence. I wanted Ava to tell Kate. I wanted her to leave for longer than a night. The book gives her anger and then takes it back, and the taking back is where the series loses me a little.

I understand the argument that this is a romance and the couple must survive. I still think a novel can keep its couple and keep its moral seriousness. This one chooses the couple.

The Four Days He Cannot Take Back

The other confession is about the four days Jesse disappeared in the first book. He drank, and he slept with other women. He does not dress it up. Ava has to weigh that against his claim that she is the first woman he has ever loved, which is both the most romantic thing he says and the least useful, because being first does not mean being safe.

What I appreciated here is that Malpas does not let the confession be a clean absolution. Ava does not forgive in a single scene. She asks questions, she imagines details, she hates herself for imagining. The jealousy that has driven Jesse through two books now has a home in her, and she does not like the person it makes her. That symmetry is the closest the novel comes to real insight.

Around this stretch, the supporting cast gets more room. Kate and Sam have their own strained relationship, and it is not treated as comic relief. John becomes more visible, a quiet presence who sees everything and says little. There is a good book in John's point of view, watching this pair tear through a house. The Manor's other members drift at the edge of scenes, never fully explained, always reminding Ava that she is the newest person in a long history she cannot audit.

Then the cycle repeats. A fight, a separation, a grand gesture, sex, a calm week, another fight. The calm weeks are the most interesting and the least dramatized. Malpas tells us they were happy, shows us one breakfast, and then reaches for the next crisis. By the fourth pass I could feel the machinery. The middle of the book is where I started skimming, and I am not a skimmer.

A Ring at The Manor

Near the end there is an intense confrontation at The Manor that forces Ava to choose openly, in front of people who have watched Jesse burn through women for years. The scene works because it is public. All the private bargaining of the previous four hundred pages has to be spoken aloud in a room built for secrets, and Ava finally says what she wants while Jesse's history stands around them.

Then he proposes. She accepts. The wedding is set for the following month, over her protests and before she has told her parents. That last detail is the truest thing in the book. A woman who has spent months asking to be consulted agrees to a date chosen for her, and the novel frames it as romance because the ring is beautiful and the man is on his knees.

I closed the book on the engagement, not a marriage, and I was glad of it. The ending is not a resolution. It is a deadline. Ava has won nothing except a public promise, and the promise is from a man who has already broken the largest one.

What Works, and What Wears Thin

Ava's first-person voice is the reason to read. She is funny and blunt, and she notices things a lesser narrator would smooth over: the smell of a hangover, the exact sound of a lock, the way a rich man's apology always arrives with a receipt. London and Surrey feel lived in, not just photographed. There are night buses and bad coffee and site meetings in the rain, and the design work is described with enough specificity to be convincing. The book also does the job a sequel owes its readers. It answers the age question, the scar question, the missing-days question. That sounds like a low bar. It is more than many series manage.

The prose is often clunky. Sentences repeat their own shape. Emotional beats are announced before they are dramatized, and certain phrases return so often they become tics. The birth-control deception is handled too quickly, as I said. The age gap and the wealth gap are used as glamour rather than examined. Jesse being older is sexy; Jesse being rich is convenient; neither fact is allowed to cost Ava anything she cannot pay with a shrug. And the middle repeats the same fight and reunion until the pattern stops meaning anything.

This is also an explicit book. The sex scenes are frequent, detailed, and long, and several of them arrive immediately after revelations that should make intimacy impossible. Readers who want the heat will be served. Readers who need the emotional accounting to match it will be frustrated. And again, this is not a standalone. It begins mid-crisis and ends mid-promise, and the third volume is waiting.

Who should skip it? Anyone hoping for a romance that takes the pills seriously, or for a heroine who leaves when leaving is the sane choice. Who should read it? Anyone already caught by Ava's narration in the first book and curious about how deep Malpas will go into Jesse's damage. She goes deeper than I expected, and then she puts a ring on it.

The image I keep is not the terrace or the ring. It is Ava in Jesse's bathroom, holding a small plastic case that should have been hers alone, and hearing him explain, in the voice he uses when he is certain he is right, that he did it because he could not bear the thought of her leaving. The book wants me to find that tragic. I find it frightening, and the fact that Ava finds it both is the most honest thing in 544 pages.