Zebra Lovegram, $4.99, ISBN 0-8217-5666-4
Historical Erotica, 1997

Desire Me Only sees Thea Devine on a really bad day. Toned down sex, so much hate, and absolutely no romance, unless you count the “Romance” word on the spine.

This one is about Lady Diandra Reynell and her sister Selena leaving India to live with Diandra’s stepson Justin. They hatehatehatehate each other, but they meet in some deserted maze-like thing under their estate for hate-filled shagging. I’m talking about Diandra and Justin, not Diandra and Selena, so I hope you aren’t expecting anything else. These shagging sessions are short, toned-down, and not at all erotic, more like perfunctory, especially when Justin is boinking a woman he is sure murdered his father.

A thousand minus points for the ghastly image of Diandra hysterically splatting and rubbing Justin’s, ahem, cream all over her kittens. Is aloe vera out of fashion already? Mind you, she doesn’t bathe after her beauty treatment, so I can only imagine how she stinks to high heaven when she serves tea to those British marms. Hmm, that’s a thought. Too bad the author never presents a scene like that one. Seriously, I still give a shudder whenever I pass the toiletries and cosmetics section in the supermarket downtown.

The finale is one silly melodrama, of course, no question about that. This is Thea Devine, Queen of Over-the-top Conspiracies we are talking about here. But the incessant hatehatehate bickering, punctuated by that icky beauty treatment (does the author know something about the properties of male fluids that I don’t – endowment amelioration properties, perhaps?) and perfunctory sex give me a really head-splitting migraine.