Liquid Silver Books, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-59578-510-7
Historical Erotica, 2009
A Royal Dilemma has a very dumb start, I must say. It’s 1895 and our Russian princess heroine Tatiana Antropov has a great idea. She decides to catch her vile husband in action in an opium den so that she can get her divorce. So here she is, alone and unarmed, in the seediest part of town. You can guess what happens, I’m sure. Alas, my hopes are dashed when our princess is spared a whole lot of excruciating pain when two men show up to save her from her three would-be rapists.
Prince Dimitri Buzek and his companion Count Klaus von Essena are pretty cool though in that they shoot down villains without batting an eyelid and they make the whole thing so sexy. I don’t know why, therefore, they would decide that they will share Tatiana between them. She may be hot, but her appeal goes down the drain the moment she opens her mouth to speak. Then again, clearly it isn’t her thinking skill that draws those men to her. I mean, she wants to be anonymous, so she tells the two men that her name is Tatiana. Bravo, Miss Genius!
Because these two men are hot, unlike the robbers, Tatiana doesn’t fight so hard when it comes to sleeping with those two men. She is special in a way because the two men make it a point never to sleep with the same woman before. Don’t ask; I can only imagine that these two men have a large blackboard at home where they cross out the name of the women they have each slept with so that the other person doesn’t stick it to the wrong person.
Much of this story revolves around sex, give and take a few dozen words that aren’t part of a sex scene. Normally this is not a problem for me as it is pretty clear from the packaging that this is a naughty story. Alas, in this instance, the villain is depicted as someone who is into young boys – always an easy and inelegant way to present a caricature bad buy. More significantly, the heroine is as dumb as a whole sack full of nails. The sex scenes can be hot. In fact, these sex scenes remind me of those that Susan Johnson used to write back in those days when she could still form a complete sentence. Unfortunately, one of the three participants in the “good” sex scenes is so unappealingly stupid that I cannot get into this story. Usually two out of three won’t be so bad, but in this case, the one bad apple is so stupid that she ruins the party even before it managed to take off.
