Liz Crowe, $0.99, ISBN 978-1311598585
Contemporary Romance, 2014
Boy, the author sure knows how to make the hero of Coach Love, Kieran Love, rub me off the wrong way from the first page alone. Kieran has been given the pink slip, so he rushes home to have hot sex with his fiancée Melinda, and she’s like please take a shower first because he isn’t smelling too nice. This causes our hero to want to break things.
Fury raced up his spine and hit his lower brain like a sledgehammer. The small bang the bottle made when it slammed down on the table gave him minimal satisfaction.
Okay, he is not in a good mood, and I can see why. He also says that they haven’t had sex in over a month. Still, the fact that she doesn’t know that he’s been laid off, and her not wanting to bend over ASAP just because he wants her too can make him feel so murderous… yikes.
“Yeah.” He stripped, climbed into her expensive expanse of tile and cranked all six shower heads on full blast. “So once I’m clean, can we fuck? I mean, make love ’cause I am one hard-up dude, pookie,” he said as he jacked off so he could make it through the next few hours with her.
Well, that sure endears him further to me.
Fortunately, our heroine Cara will never say no to him, and is ready to be plugged in on demand 24/7. What, you think that brazen hussy Melinda is the heroine? Come on, romance heroines can’t say no to the hero whenever he wants the snu-snu, it’s the law. Her own fiancé is a Republican that pats her head each time she attempts to go all “feminist” on him, because she’s so cute that way, and that makes Kent, of course, the bad guy.
How is he different from a guy that wants sex on demand and starts slamming things with his fist the moment his randy willy is left unsheathed for more than ten seconds, though, I don’t know. Kieran is written to be “furious” at Melinda for standing him up—that sure makes his romance with Cara not feel like a rebound or makeover, that’s for certain!—and is even more moody and furious now that an injury has cut short his NBA career and force him to come back to his hometown to brood and scowl 24/7. So yes, when Melinda stands up him and he bumps into Cara again, he makes out with Cara. He graciously concedes that he won’t blame Melinda for his action, because he’s not “that type” of guy.
Yay, both Cara and Kieran are skanks, but that’s okay, because Melinda dares to not want to play pokey-pokey when the guy wants it while Kent is a Republican. Those two totally deserve to be cheated on.
The story is actually a familiar one, with the grouchy injured athlete pouring out his issues into a healing, willing receptacle called “romance heroine”, but my goodness, these people.
Kieran and Cara are two trashy, skanky llamas that deserve one another because everyone else around them deserve better, but you know, I’m okay with that if the author had embraced this universal truth and let them be skanks. Unfortunately, the author labors under this delusion that these two slatterns are somehow the good guys, and this dissonance between the author’s delusion and my perception—and, of course, my perception is always right—ends up distracting me from fully embracing the skanks and the hos in this story like they are my beloved family members.
I have to admit, the sex scenes and the whole trashy tone of this story can be fun. Reading Coach Love is like, I don’t, watching 90 Day Fiancé or something, where the whole thing is just a tawdry circus designed to entertain me by ridiculing the participants while pretending that the whole thing is done to elevate romance or some other nonsense.
I’ve had fun reading this, hence the three oogies, but I don’t think it’s for the right reasons, heh. Like the previous entry in this series, this one is a circus alright, as long as nobody treats this one like a conventional romance novel and risks getting injured in the process.
