Dude, I just spent a pretty penny acquiring a lot of 43 Blaze backlists from Ebay. I should really be trying to save money so I can afford a parking permit for school (it’s $700 a year or something equally ridiculous). I should be saving money for textbooks. I should be saving money so I can afford to eat more than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches everyday.

Fuck it. I really like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, anyway.

By the time I have to return to school in the fall, I will be overdosed on tried and true plot contrivances such as: secret babies, wacky virgins who want to have that ONE NIGHT with the bad boy of their dreams, and faux bad girls returning to their hometown to find love with the man who once relieved them of their precious hymens. I can’t wait!

Edited to add: I also bought a lot of 40 Harlequin Temptation backlists. What is WRONG with me? Am I trying to drive myself insane? Yes, I think I am. For the Love of God, won’t someone stage an Intervention? Maybe I should take up knitting. Or go back to writing X-Files fanfic. No, I can’t. It’s too late for me. Won’t it be funny if I started reading nothing but category romances? And by funny, I mean sad. Like my grandma who used to go to the swap meet to buy huge boxes of Harlequin Presents for five dollars each, then disappear for hours, and we would find her later reading in her room, with piles of category romances sitting on her stomach and potato chip crumbs all over the bed and her hair. Oh, grandma, is this your legacy to me? Couldn’t you have left me something cooler like money for college or jewelry?

The chick looks like what’s her name from the O.C.

Grade: B-

Man, I can’t stop reading these little HPs. They’re like crack to me. They’re dated, the dialogue is atrocious, and most of them are the most clichéd pieces of crap I’ve ever read, but I can’t stop reading them. They’re like Passions, General Hospital, and All My Children thrown in a blender, with a dash Skinnymax for flavoring. I think it’s because I’m an instant gratification kind of chick and these suckers are less than 200 pages. Before I can get sucked in, it’s already done! I can read them at work, before I go to bed, while I’m working out, or while I’m in the john. It’s awesome!

The heroine of Susan Napier’s Counterfeit Secretary (speaking of counterfeit, have any of you ever seen Counterfeit Contessa with Téa Leoni? Awful stuff, but it’s a guilty pleasure) is thirty-year-old single mother, Ria Duncan. Her husband René died in a drunk driving accident, leaving her with two twin boys and his father (who becomes Ria’s handyman, cook, babysitter, and father-figure), and to keep her family out of the poorhouse, Ria has to endure working for the Biggest. Bastard. In. The. Industry. In her current position as a secretary, she has lasted the longest because she knows just how to manipulate her boss. Though a wild, horny woman at heart just aching to break free (aren’t they all?), Ria overhears her boss telling an employee exactly what he wants in a secretary (efficient, sexless, impersonal, dead inside), so Ria makes-under herself to this paragon, and passes the interview with flying colors (don’t even get me started on the interview process. I’m still gritting my teeth). On the outside, Ria is a cool, staid, completely sterile woman with her hair scraped back painfully, her body in shapeless, drab suits, and fake librarian glasses perched on her imperious nose for good measure. She is virtually untouchable, emotionless, and serves her boss as particularly efficient office equipment. On the inside, rooowr, watch out now!

Her boss, twenty nine year old James Everett (who totally looks like Mr. Rogers on the front cover), is not really a giant dick. Compared to the other HP heroes circa 1985, he’s actually quite princely. At 14, he drops out of school, gets himself in some trouble, but with hard work, pulls himself out of the gutter, and becomes one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in town. That’s very commendable, of course, but he accomplishes this by expecting the best out of his employees, and in the process, he has not been very nice to them. He has come to expect nothing but the best from his current secretary, Ria Duncan, but to him, she doesn’t really exist. She comes in every day from nine to five, does her job efficiently, and goes home. He has never really spared her a second thought. One night, while he’s out to dinner with his nephew, he spots a beautiful redhead who gets the fires in his loins a-roarin’, and practically eats her alive in the balcony of the restaurant. The beautiful redhead, of course, turns out to be none other than his aloof, sexless secretary (duh!) who is out on a birthday date, and suddenly, he’s seeing her in a different light, and finds himself unable to keep her hands off of her.

Can these two ever get past the secrets and lies that keep them apart and find the path to true love? Oh, shut up.

When I picked up this book, I was hoping I would find a Secretary-type spanking, but alas! it was not to be. I always found these HP secretary-boss pairings kind of sleazy, but after seeing Secretary with James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, I found myself viewing them in a new light. They’re still sleazy, but kind of hot, too. It would have been awesome if James pulled Ria over his desk and spanked her for every typo on the report she prepared for him, but no, he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t even make her wear weird bondage suits and pick up things from the floor with her teeth. The least he could have done was ordered her to wear short skirts and dropped pencils on the floor all the time for her to pick up. Ugh.

Anyway, I don’t know how to review this book. On one hand, it wasn’t so horrible that it made me want to tear out its pages and stick them one by one down the shredder, but on the other, it was bad enough that I’m hard-pressed to remember what I liked and didn’t like about it. What I do remember is being pleasantly surprised that James doesn’t turn out to be one of those monsters who call women slut-bag-whores when they find out that the object of their desire is not as pure as they initially thought. When he finds out that Ria is a real person with her own personal problems and drama, he gets angry at first that she lied to him, but he doesn’t overreact. He does, however, get pissed that she won’t let him get to know her outside of work. He gets frustrated that she won’t tell him about her issues and won’t let him help.

When Ria finds out that James is not the prick she initially thought he was, she stubbornly refuses to “let him in”. She wants him, but she does the annoying tug-of-war deal that heroines usually do in these books, thinking shit like “Oh, I want him, but I’m a mother of twins and therefore not allowed to have my own needs.” or “Oh, he looks so good in his suit, so yummy… so virile… why I am thinking these things? Bad, Ria, bad!” Good lord, woman, heaven forbid that you should have a personal life outside of your children. The funny thing is, Ria gets pissed at her ex-boyfriend (and rightly so) for sleeping with another woman, not because he cheats on her, but because he doesn’t go to her for his sexual needs. When the ex-boyfriend calls her while she’s in James’ office, she yells at him in French, telling him that she won’t marry him, but would settle being his sex toy. Naturally, James speaks French, and is able to decipher what she is saying to her ex-boyfriend.

When disaster strikes and Ria finds herself needing James, she freely takes advantage of his willingness to help her out, even as she tells herself that she doesn’t really need him. James attentively takes care of her needs, her family, but the second she doesn’t need him anymore, she kind of rudely pushes him away, rationalizing to herself that he’s not ready for marriage, and she and her family would just be a burden to him. What an asshole! As if a guy would stick around, picking up your kid from school and shit, just so he could get some ass. Yeah… Ria kind of pisses me off in this book. I usually defend the heroine in this type of situation, but she’s really pretty stupid when it comes to matters de l’amour.

Another thing I dig about this book is Ria’s kids. They’re kids, dude! They’re not walking, talking plot contrivances, but actual kids. They talk like kids, they act like kids, and most importantly, they don’t do creepy things like match-make and shit. I know I always complain about kids in these books, but here, I don’t mind them so much. I’m feeling so magnanimous about children right now that I might just pick up a book where a tough-as-nails SOB type of boss finds himself stranded with a baby who is his nephew/ex-girlfriend’s kid/abandoned at his doorstep, so he commandeers the heroine/his secretary to help him out. Check me out!

Man, I can’t get enough of these little HP gems. I might even head on out to EBay to see if I could find a large lot of Blaze or whatever. Hooray for dated, outmoded HP plots that can’t possibly exist in real life! Woo!

is this chicken, what I have, or is it Goddess?

Grade: B

I don’t like to cry. It’s not because I view it as a weakness or anything like that, but because I am an ugly crier. We’re talking puffy cheeks, snotty nose, crack ho eyes, and piteous whining. For making me cry, I should throw this book into the fireplace and set fire to it, cackling with glee while the flames consumed its pages. But I won’t do that. Instead, this book will go to my keeper shelf and stay there. In fact, this book is a keeper for three reasons: 1) it made my cold dead heart feel again 2) I dug the ancient mythology angle and 3) BIG-TITTIED MERMAIDS FUCKING BIG-COCKED MERMEN!* I’m serious, dude, this book does not shy away from mer-people sex.

But I’ll get to that later. The heroine, Christine Canady (an alliterative heroine!), is an Air Force sergeant, but not like a butchy Air Force sergeant with unfashionably short hair and a chip on her shoulder. In fact, she’s kind of a wimp. And girly. On her twenty-fifth birthday, CC finds herself alone with two bottles of champagne and a bucket of KFC (heeeey… that’s how I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday. Awesome!), because she has no boyfriend, no social life, and her parents, who didn’t remember her birthday till the last minute, are off on another cruise. In short, CC is a Nelly No Mates who spends her birthday ALL BY HER LONESOME with two bottles of champagne, a bucket of KFC, and the Witches of Eastwick on VHS (change the movie to the original Dawn of the Dead and that’s exactly how I celebrated my 25th birthday). Inspired by the movie, CC decides that she can use a little magic in her life. Armed by an old mythology book, ingredients for a summoning spell that she just happens to have on hand, and her big gaping hole of loneliness (not that gaping hole, you pervs), CC heads out to her patio, performs the spell with all the sincerity and desperation she can drunkenly muster, and dances like a crazy lady under the moonlight. Awesome. Afterwards, she strips off her clothes, masturbates, and goes to bed.

When she wakes up the next morning, CC feels like a new woman. As she dashes all over the place, preparing for a 3-month deployment to Saudi Arabia, she notices that men are nicer to her, complimenting her on her good looks (they never have before, natch!). At the marketplace, a beautiful gypsy woman gives her an amber necklace, and tells her to wear it at all times because she’ll need its magic during her journey. CC assumes she means her journey to Saudi Arabia, puts it on, and goes home to finish packing. During her flight to Saudi Arabia, she encounters a handsome Air Force pilot named Sean who insists they switch seats because he notices how CC—who is afraid of flying—looks petrified sitting next to the propeller. While over the Mediterranean , the propellers fail, the plane crashes into the sea, and Sean is mortally injured (it would have been CC had she stayed in that seat). As the plane is about to explode, CC and the crew are ordered to swim as far away from the plane as they could, but CC’s ankle is snagged by a piece of the wreckage and she is unable to move. She begins to drown, but a pretty blonde mermaid pulls her out of the water, and gives her a deep kiss. With tongue. And thus begins our story.

The kiss magically switches their bodies and CC ends up with the big-tittied mermaid’s hot body, while Undine, the mermaid, ends up with CC’s skinny, boobless body. Sucker. When CC comes to, she’s a fucking mermaid. At this point, I would have been like “Jesus Holy Goddamn Jumpin’ Christmas, I’m a big-tittied mermaid!” and proceeded to totally lose my shit for the next two weeks. After a minor freak-out, CC totally takes it in stride, escapes a raping from Undine’s brother—ugh—and swims into a cove where she meets Gaea, the Earth Mother, and Undine’s mom. Gaea gives CC a.k.a Undine the Little Mermaid (with a little dash of Splash) spiel about going to land to find true love—she’ll be given temporary legs—but CC must return to the sea every three days to transform into a mermaid or she’ll die. Unfortunately, before she sets off to meet a big, strong knight who will love and worship her forever, she meets a studly hot stuff merman whom she falls in love with, instead. A merman named Dylan.

When I read the merman’s name, I did a spit-take, then laughed uproariously for ten minutes because I suddenly got this image in my head of a merman with sideburns and a leather jacket. What the hell kind of name is Dylan for a merman? Ah, but then I look it up, and find out that Dylan is a Welsh name that means “born by the sea”. Huh. I still have the theme song of Beverly Hills, 90210 playing in my head, though.

Anyway, I’m not going to say anything more about the story because to do so would be an injustice to you, dear reader. You have to read this book on your own and savor it for yourself as I did. It’s a good, fairy tale type of story, and there is a fine romance that develops between Dylan and CC. Hot stuff, y’all. We get to find out how merfolks do it. It’s kind of gross, but it’s inventive. I can’t imagine doing it with a fish, but Dylan is so sweet and so romantic, that you kind of get over the whole fish thing… I have a “what’s that smell” joke in my head, but you know, it’s lame, so I’m not going to bother with it.

As much as I love the book, however, I do have a few quibbles about it. First of all, I can’t accept how quickly CC takes to the entire situation. She’s a modern woman, for God’s sake, but she readily accepts her new surroundings. She spares maybe two minutes at most thinking about her former life, but hey, I don’t really blame her because her old life kind of sucked balls. I would have liked to read about CC adjusting to her Dark Ages surroundings. She could have at least whined about the lack of toilet paper, Tivo, central air, and pizza, but she doesn’t do this, and I kind of felt cheated. I really enjoy fish out water—thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week—stories, and just can’t accept that CC wouldn’t whine a little about the lack of modern conveniences.

I also have a bit of a problem with the jarring use of modern language and I’m not talking about CC. For example, on page 276, her lady’s maid Isabel tells her to “stroke his ego”. Now I don’t know a lot about psychology—I don’t really know a lot about anything—but I thought that the word “ego” was an invention of Freud in the nineteenth century. I mean, Isabel is a Dark Ages kind of gal, but she also has surprisingly modern attitude about things, and it kind of takes me out of the story a little. Dug the girl power angle, though, and I thought it rocked when CC earns the respect of the women servants in the monastery where she stays, and does the obligatory (for a romance novel) Waiting to Exhale thing with them.

My last “quibble” is with Dylan. I don’t really get much from him as a hero, but this is CC’s story, so I understand that. Still, I would have liked to read more about his feelings, his thoughts. I also kind of got annoyed about how perfect he is. He is just so sweet and so nice and so understanding and says things like “I’ll wait for you for an eternity” that he kind of reminded me of Wesley the Farm Boy before he turned into Dread Pirate Roberts. As it is, he’s really nothing more than a Ken Doll with fins. I hate to say this, but I wish he would have been more… Dread Pirate Roberts than the “as you wish” Farm Boy.

Other than that, I really liked this story. The Little Mermaid has always been my favorite Disney cartoon and I really like stories that has to do with mermaids. Especially mermaids who have sex. OUTSTANDING WORK! I like how Ms. Cast expertly weaves the ancient mythologies into this story, so that it is smooth and blends in quite well. I really enjoyed Ms. Cast’s prose and I will be looking for her other Goddess stuff. I have a bunch of Luna books that I haven’t read and know that she’s written a couple, so I may have to see if I have any of her stuff.

By the way, if you read this book and dig it, I recommend that you check out Sirena by Donna Jo Napoli. It’s Young Adult, but Ms. Napoli is really good with taking an old fairy tale story and putting her own spin on it. My favorite of hers is Zel, which is a story about Rapunzel. Good stuff.

*To the visitors who have accidentally stumbled upon my site when they typed “big-tittied mermaids fucking big-cocked mermen” into Google and ended up here: WELCOME! Serves you right, pervert.

Grade: C+

I read somewhere (it might have been on Mrs. Giggles) that this book has a pretty hot phone sex scene, so I thought I’d check it out, and put it on my queue at Booksfree. I finished the book in an hour and a half—the phone sex scene is very hot and quite well written—but in another hour or two, I could barely even remember the names of the main characters. They say that memory is the first to go for an aging person, but I’d like to think that these characters just weren’t that memorable. More on that later.

ER Nurse Georgia Adams can’t sleep. Apart from the heat wave that has the city in a death grip and her broken A/C, she is so very horny, and can’t get laid. She is currently dating a very pleasant accountant (and has been for ten months), but the physical aspect of their relationship is just not progressing as quickly as she wants it, and she’s starting to suspect that her boyfriend Rob might be gay. Her “quirky” best friend Toni suggests that she should call up Rob one day and talk dirty to him, just to kind of test the waters, and see if he’s ready to get sexual with her. One night, while feeling particularly horny, she speed-dials Rob, tells him not to say anything as soon as he says “hello”, moans a little, says a couple of dirty things, and hangs up.

The phone number she dials, however, is not Rob’s (she programmed the wrong number on her speed dial), but police officer Ken Medlock’s. Ken has been having trouble sleeping, too, because he’s horny, just like Georgia. Heeeey! One night, a lady with a sexy voice calls him, talks dirty to him before he could even say anything, and turns him on more than he’s ever been turned on in his life. Afterwards, Ken goes to bed, and gets the first good night’s sleep he’s had in months. The next day, Ken feels really shitty because he took advantage of the woman on the phone, who wasn’t even aware that she dialed the wrong number, but rationalizes that the woman must be a stripper (with a name like Georgia, what else could she be?) or someone with loose morals, because everyone knows that nice ladies don’t ever have phone sex.

When Officer Ken (who is thirty-seven years old… shouldn’t he be a detective by now?) runs over a dog because he’s not paying attention to the road, he drives the injured dog to the nearest hospital, and encounters a hot, but abrasive nurse who tells him to fuck off because IT IS A HOSPITAL FOR HUMANS, MORON! Officer Ken tries to appeal to the woman’s gentle side, but the nurse won’t budge because she can get fired for helping him, so Officer Ken tries to bandage the dog himself, and ends up injuring the dog further. At this point, the nurse—who turns out to be Georgia, duh—should have called for security and had the crazy man escorted out, but she feels sorry for the idiot, and takes over patching up the pooch. Anyway, on their way out, Officer Ken overhears that the nurse’s name is Georgia, and wonders if she could be the same Georgia who said dirty things to him the night before. When she starts talking about her boyfriend Rob—she called him Rob over the phone—Officer Ken’s suspicions are confirmed, and after seeing for himself that she is a) hot and b) not a woman of loose morals, he decides that she’s the woman for him, and commences stalking her. Alright!

For me, this book is just eh. Georgia and Officer Ken have chemistry together, but when they are apart, the story becomes very dry and kind of uninteresting. I don’t really get to know Georgia and Officer Ken—perhaps because the story is too short—and when they’re not together, I don’t really care enough about either of them to want to read about them separately. For example, we get Georgia, who is immediately attracted to Officer Ken, but wants to give her relationship with Rob a chance, so she keeps having phone sex with the guy she believes to be Rob (the sessions get hotter and hotter). Because of this, we get nothing from Georgia other than her neurotic whining about wanting to bone Officer Ken, but at the same time, not wanting to give up on her relationship with Rob (according to her, it is just getting good). This is all we get from Georgia: “Oh, Officer Ken looks so hot in his uniform and he’s so brave and manly, but oh, I must stay true to Rob, or I’ll be no better than my man-slut father!” Georgia’s father, you see, was a big horndog and cheated on Georgia’s mom every chance he got, and she’s afraid that she’s going to turn out just like him.

As for Officer Ken, I didn’t really like him as a hero, because I think he was a douchebag for not admitting to Georgia that he was not Rob. He allows Georgia to keep talking dirty to him, not confessing to her about who he really is, and that’s just really sleazy to me. Imagine calling your boyfriend for some phone nookie, but you inadvertently dial the wrong number, and some faceless jerk whacks off to your voice. That’s just disgusting. Sure, their phone sex sessions are hot, but I couldn’t get over the fact that Georgia thinks it’s ROB, HER BOYFRIEND, on the other line, not this strip o’gram cop! Then he starts following her around, showing up wherever she goes… come on, that’s creepy. I just didn’t buy Officer Ken as a hero, I’m sorry. He’s just gross to me.

Oh, and there’s this ridiculous scene where Georgia shows up at the police station dressed up in her nurse’s uniform (she didn’t have time to change) and the other cops think that she’s the stripper they hired for Officer Ken’s birthday. Do nurses even wear the white uniform and the little square hat anymore? I thought they only wear scrubs now, because it’s more comfortable, so it’s easier for them to move around and do their job. Don’t they only wear the white uniform in soft core porn movies on Skinnymax?

I also got irritated with the way Ms. Bond resolves Georgia’s Rob and daddy issues. SPOILER: 1) Rob turns out to be an ex-con and a jerk. 2) Georgia confesses to her mother that she is worried that she can’t ever have a true committed relationship with anyone because she fell in love with one man, while dating another. She is afraid that she is just like her father, who was an unfaithful slut. Her mother, in turn, tells her that she never enjoyed sex, so it was justified that Georgia’s father sought sexual comfort from other women. This made me slap my forehead so hard that I think I left a palm print on it. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Georgia somehow works it out in her crazy, crazy head that it was her mother’s fault that her father fucked around on her, because she didn’t like sex, and therefore failed in her role as a woman to provide a hot hole for her man to stick his swizzle stick in. I call that BULLSHIT, my friend. That’s just pure laziness! It’s like Ms. Bond had this one loose end to tie up, so she decides “fuck it”, and wraps it up in an idiotic, who-cares manner that can’t be called anything but BULLSHIT. I mean, I’m glad Georgia resolves her “I’m a horndog like my father and will never be able to find ONE man to settle down with and not fuck around on” issues and all, but at whose expense, my friend? It’s just… bullshit.

Oh, and did I mention that Officer Ken is a psycho creep and the only reason that Georgia didn’t run away and file a restraining order against him is because he looks hot in his uniform? What if the guy whose number she dialed turned out to look like Leatherface? Think about that, my friend, think about that.

Moral of the story? Before you talk dirty to your lover, VERIFY that you dialed the correct number and that you have the person that you want on the line. Do not start saying shit like “I’m not wearing any panties” until you are 100% sure that it is your man/woman on the line. You don’t want to be accidentally saying that shit to his roommate/mother, do you?

Grade: C+

How nice of Harlequin to put two of Lori Foster’s old backlists together and make me pay $9.99 for it. Ha ha, just kidding. I only paid $1.75 for it at my local USB. Sucker.

The first story, Scandalized! was published in 1997. I was this close to liking it. It has a cute twist to the whole “I! Must! Have! a Baby! Now!” cliché made popular by Harlequin Presents before I was even born. The heroine of this story is Olivia Anderson, a successful lingerie boutique owner, so you know she’s dead inside. Because she owns a business. And it’s successful.

When the book opens, Olivia is about to seal the deal with gorgeous man-about-town Tony Austin to install one of her boutiques in one of his hotels (that’s not a euphemism for anything, you pervs). Before Olivia could celebrate, however, Tony reveals to her that he’s had her investigated and knows everything there is to know about her. Everything. At this point, I would have screamed “fuck this shit!” and ran to the nearest police station to file a restraining order against the creep, but Tony’s not finished! Oh, no, not by a long shot. Why is he so interested in her, you ask? Well, it’s like this… Tony is a successful, handsome man who owns a successful chain of hotels, about five luxury cars, a mansion, and a family who ABSOLUTELY ADORES HIM, but there is something missing in his life. If you guess true love, you are wrong. Go home. If you guess BABY! BABY! BABY! then you are absolutely right and need to go outside and do something else because you’ve obviously read too many romance novels.

Anyway, Tony tells Olivia that he’s been observing her for a while and has chosen her womb as the oven for his bun because he believes she has good genes and they would make the perfect widdle baby. Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! In exchange for the usage of her body for nine months, he will give her a bunch of money and relocate her to another state, so that there is no chance that he and his new baby will run into her in the distant future. How nice. Instead of incapacitating him by bashing his head in with a bat, kicking him repeatedly in the nuts, running away to another country, and changing her name, Olivia decides that she will accept his offer, but only on her terms. She will allow him to impregnate her (I just threw up in my mouth while typing that), but only via lots of fucking and not in vitro fertilization like he wants. What Olivia, doesn’t tell him, however, is that she has AIDS, and only has three months to live. Just kidding! That would have been awesome, though. Not because AIDS is awesome (because it’s really awful), but… you know what? I’m sick, I need help. Ahem. What Olivia, doesn’t tell him, however, is that her uterus is a vast, barren wasteland like the Sahara, and she cannot ever have babies. Ever. That’s why she’s so dead inside! Awww.

Tony reluctantly agrees to Olivia’s terms and they get to the fizznuckin’, but not before heavy interference from his family first. His siblings are obviously refugees from Ms. Foster’s other books, but I’m too lazy to look them up. His siblings and their respective spouses are so annoying that they bypass the Bridgerton territory AND collect $200. Every time Tony and Olivia are about to have some sexin’, they bring their fucking kids over and make them baby-sit… you know, shit like that. Man, if I were getting ready for a whole weekend of heavy-duty boning to be administered by a really hot dude, and my sister drops by without warning and drops off her fucking kids, I would be like, “Wait a minute, you don’t have kids! Who are these children? Return them and get your money back, bitch!” But if she did have kids and brought them over while I was about to fizznuck a hot dude, I would slam the door on her face, nail two by fours to the door, turn off my cell phone, and unplug my land lines. TONY IS ABOUT TO FUCK A HOT CHICK, YOU BASTARDS! Man, some people just don’t have manners.

You know, I was totally digging Olivia. She’s a successful career woman, doesn’t bother with pesky details like the truth, would actually LIE to a guy to get some ass, and best of all, she’s dead inside (but angsty!). Tony wasn’t bad, either. He’s sweet, rich, rumored to be spectacular in the sack (of course, he’s a man-slut! What did you expect?), and did I mention rich? This story could have been awesome if Ms. Foster had cut out Tony’s family entirely (we get it, he wants a baby ‘cause he’s so ronery!) and instead used those pages to really, really explore Tony’s and Olivia’s developing feelings for each other. As it is, we don’t really get anything, except Tony’s relatives saying how perfect Tony and Olivia are for each other and how “natural” Olivia is at motherhood (gag!). I don’t want to hear this stuff from Tony’s family… I WANT TO SEE IT. Worse yet, I got the feeling at the end that Tony and Olivia only got together because they felt pressured by Tony’s family.

Also, there’s a scene in this book where Tony’s sister’s husband and Tony’s brother go to Olivia’s lingerie boutique to buy sexy underwear for their wives, and Tony’s sister’s husband tells Tony’s brother how hot Tony’s sister looks in lingerie. Dude, that’s just wrong. I don’t want to read about that shit. Unless it’s Incestuous Orgy Party Time! like that Linda Howard novel.

The next story titled Sex Appeal, first published in 2001, and tells the story of a woman named Shadow Callahan (aw fuck, a hippy!), an adult novelty shop proprietor. Oddly enough, her store doesn’t carry anal beads, double-headed dildos, strap-ons, or gimps masks. Naw, she sells T-shirts like the shit Britney wears (i.e. Britney’s MILF in Training T-shirt), cutesy thong underwear, and flavored body oils… you know, the average teenage third-base accessories. Shadow is a “free spirit” (read: she has an IQ of 30), a woman who speaks her mind (read: she humiliates herself every five minutes by the stupid shit she says), and dates four or five guys at a time (read: the last time she got laid was seven years ago and all of these guys are her platonic friends). Naturally, she will meet a straight-laced, stick-in-the-ass guy whose life she will brighten and beautify by bringing to him love and laughter (“wacky” antics ensue).

The hero in question is Brent Bramwell (an alliterative hero! My favorite!), an old money kind of dude who owns the building that houses Shadow’s Sex Appeal (but he doesn’t tell her, natch!). One day, he is walking down the street when he is entranced by the sight of a bare stomach and legs at a store window, and promptly falls on his ass in the snow. Shadow, who was the owner of the stomach and legs, was in the process of hanging Christmas lights when she sees Brent fall down like a ton of bricks, helps him out, and instantly falls in love with him. Fool.

On their first date, Shadow asks him what he’s looking for in a wife, and he says “For one thing, she can’t be a businesswoman. Too independent. And she would have to be biddable. Someone content to be a wife and mother above all things” (page 217). At first, I thought he is joking. He HAS to be joking. But he isn’t. At the very least, I expected supposedly forward thinking Shadow to laugh, throw coffee in his face, and go back to her store, but instead she just “smiled in understanding”. At this point, I was done with the book. I didn’t even want to finish it. What the fuck, Shadow? Are you or are you not a businesswoman? Are you or are you not an “independent” woman? If you want to get with this guy, you have to give up your business and identity to be a wife and love-slave to him and mother/slave to his children! Umm… I’m so upset that I’m ranting to a fictional character, and not a very well written one at that!

There is a side story about Shadow having a stalker, but this is just a plot contrivance so that Brent will act like a complete over-protective, super-controlling paranoid lunatic, and freak Shadow out, but it goes nowhere and it makes Shadow seem mentally retarded. To wit, her stalker steals the distributor cap of her car (which makes her car useless), forcing her to call Brent to pick her up, but she doesn’t think anything of it. Moron. We are also tortured by Brent’s ex-fiancée who is a cartoon villain and so one-dimensional that we are left to wonder about Brent’s taste in women. She is in the story to show us how Shadow is so much better for Brent. What it showed me is that Brent is a moron and I don’t understand how he’s a multi-billionaire who’s supposed to be a business whiz or something.

For Lori Foster, the supposed Queen of Blaze™, the second story has the lamest sex scenes I’ve ever read. So lame. So very tepid and kind of creepy.

In the end, I give the first story a B- for effort and the second story a D+ for creeping me out and disgusting me at the same time. Good job, Lori Foster. Man, I need a beer. Or four.