Kimani, $6.50, ISBN 978-0-373-86394-5
Contemporary Romance, 2015
Embrace My Heart is a standard friends-turned-lovers story. Vectra Bauer, fresh from a break-up, doesn’t understand why her male best friend Qasim Wilder seems to be staying away from her. She wants her friend back, and, of course, he wants more than friendship from Vectra. Can she open up her heart to Qasim? Some office drama involving Qasim provides some tension in an otherwise romance-heavy story.
Boy, that is a short synopsis, I know, but that’s what happens when I get a simple old-school romance that doesn’t have many heavy fireworks or dead bodies in the plot. This is not a bad thing, of course, especially when both characters are pretty likable types. Both Vectra and Qasim are familiar characters, but the author makes the best out of what she chooses to work with and comes up with a pretty decent story. There is romance, the characters don’t do dumb things, and everything is pretty decent at the end of the day.
Only, I wish the author had toned down on the more florid aspects of her writing.
He broke their kiss. panting out labored moans as his head rested on her clavicle, and he jerked out of what was left of his clothing.
A clavicle is a fancy medical word for collarbone, in case you are wondering. This scene is now officially smarter, I guess.
Motivated by his helpless responses, she emboldened her touch, swiping her thumb across the slit at the flawless mushroom crown of his shaft.
I hope it’s not too much like a mushroom – short stalk, umbrella-like top.
She was sensitive enough to feel him flooding the condom with his seed, and the pleasure of that sensation overloaded her senses and she peaked once more.
Wait, she can experience an orgasm from… that? I’m almost envious.
The love scenes are overloaded with unnecessary adjectives. There are “sugar walls”, “satiny cradles”, “ravenous sounds of unsated lusts”, “heavy slabs of dark, packed muscle”, and “granite abs”. Qasim, in fact, is said to have an “X-rated torso” – I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. At any rate, the author goes all out, churning out all these florid phrases that have me either chuckling or scratching my head.
But, maybe the laughable love scenes are a good thing, as at least they make me laugh. The rest of the book is fairly mundane and predictable.
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