Nightshade Collections, $0.99
Contemporary Romance, 2016
Jeff likes Lily. Okay, he has never met her in person, but who needs to go through the rituals of dating when she lets him see her play with a vibrator on a regular basis? Of course, she charges money for such privilege, but don’t judge. This is like safe sex for millennials – all the fun and none of that STD stuff. But you know how it is: he really wants her to be with him for real, so he offers her money to join him on his vacation. It will just be for four days, and she’d get a million bucks for her troubles.
Yes, I give Dirty Deeds four oogies, but I have a feeling that this is one story that will polarize its readers. You see how short my synopsis of this story is? That’s because this story is short, and it ends on a note that made me want to scream. No, not because this is an awful story, but because it ends just as I am about to gag for more. It’s like almost getting to have sex with Hugh Jackman only to have him fall into a dead faint seconds before the grand event takes place – I should probably call for an ambulance, but I also feel like whacking him a few times out of frustration. That kind of feeling.
This is because, despite the brevity of the story, the author has set up two fascinating characters. The premise is already not something I come across every day, and the heroine being a plus-sized babe is only icing on the cake here, and both characters behave in ways that out of the usual formulaic behavior (in all the good ways, of course), so this is one riveting read. The sexual chemistry is palpable, and there is a love-loathing thing going on in Jeff towards Lola (that’s her real name) that has me intrigued. Lola has no weird hang-ups about sex and she certainly makes no apologies for doing what she does. She has baggage, but she doesn’t swing those heavy cases and smack me in the head with them, so to speak. This is a story of two lonely people who happen to connect for a short period of time. Who knows what will happen after four days, but I’m sure it will be good.
So, the good is that this is a lovely kind of different with engaging narrative, fascinating characters, and a vibe that reminds me of the music video of Enrique Iglesias‘s Sad Eyes, only with a greater odds at having a happy ending of some kind.
Oh, and while the premise seems raunchy, the story is too short to feature all the explicit 9-to-5 shenanigans to an explicit degree, so I would personally hesitate to consider this an erotic romance. It’s somewhere in between spicy and erotic.
Anyway, I’m not mad at all – much – that Dirty Deeds leaves me high and dry in the end. It’s kind of worth it, just for the experience of meeting Lola and Jeff for a while. I look up the author’s books on Amazon, so of course they are only available for people in selected countries that happen not to be mine, sigh. Maybe one day.
