Avon Impulse, $5.99, ISBN 978-0-06-238045-6
Historical Erotica, 2015
Desire Me More is a genuine sequel to Desire Me Now, so there is bound to be some spoilers for the other book in this review. Also, this is probably not the best book to review for a TBR Challenge thingy, as it’s the middle book in a trilogy, so I can’t give too much about the plot of this one or it’d ruin the next book. Then again, I’m not sure whether I can give away too much about this story, since most of it is just sex.
After rescuing Amelia Grant from a billion consecutive calamities in the previous book, self-made man Nicholas Riley has installed her as his secretary and sexy-wexy. Our heroine is like, ooh, sex is so fun but surely people who aren’t married yet aren’t supposed to do these things. Still, that doesn’t stop her from taking the initiative to attempt to go down on the sleeping hero at the start of the story. Luckily, Nicholas wakes up in time to give her instructions or he’d get the worst time of his life. Then again, romance heroines are born to be excellent in the sack, so who knows.
This story basically ties up some loose ends from the previous story while continuing Nicholas’s story arc. Throughout it all, Amelia shivers in feminine trepidation while Nicholas is always there go, “There, there, I got you now, you’re safe, now spread those legs and let me boink you.” Under Nicholas – literally, half the time; figuratively, the other half – she discovers some confidence to assert herself and be a bit more proactive about being in charge of her own life. She’s not all there yet, understandably so since she exists in the previous book solely to be saved and shagged, and she’s taking baby steps here. There is still hope for her in the next book, who knows.
One jarring thing here, though, is how Amelia has now morphed into some expert in male psychology after being a complete damsel in distress in the previous book. How did she get this wise? I know, it is a common trope in romance novels for heroines to be instinctively great mothers and male psychology experts, but still, some insight into how being constantly in trouble can make you become such an expert would have been nice.
Nicholas is, of course, Nicholas. He’s not as emo or whiny as other billionaire heroes in sexy trilogies of this sort. In fact, he actually puts Amelia on a nice pedestal without ruining the whole magic with tired Madonna/whore issues.
The author pads this story with a hefty amount of sex scenes that can be enjoyably steamy, although they also require the reader to accept that, just like how she is all of a sudden a PhD holder in psychology, Amelia is also innately a sex guru that can make experienced men like Nicholas wail ay mama 24/7. Still, the scenes are hot so I can’t say I’m bored.
Desire Me Now isn’t the most exciting thing to read, as the plot only advances by a bit and character development relies as much on the reader’s familiarity with tropes to fill in the blanks as it does on the author’s efforts. Still, the plot does go somewhere, the sex scenes are nice, and the characters are inching towards becoming folks that I can certainly warm up to hopefully by the third book. So all in all, this one’s alright. I’ve certainly read worse second books in other similar “a single book stretched out into a sexy trilogy or, if you are Sylvia Day, a whole encyclopedia set” series that were the craze a few years ago.
