Juliette N Banks, $0.99, ISBN 979-8201831486
Contemporary Romance, 2022
Juliette N Banks’s Forbidden Touch is the second entry in The Dufort Dynasty. The first entry is free at the time of writing, while this one is $0.99 despite it not being a short story. The author really wants people to read her stuff, so who am I to disagree? It’s a happy day, because I’m reading it.
This is a billionaire story, so let’s get real. Ladies and gentlemen and Twittergenders and TikToksexuals, let’s have a show of hands: how many of you will actually consider the touch of a hot, sexy billionaire “forbidden”, especially when it comes with promises of unfettered access to his wealth?
Sadly, this one sees the author following the same old, same old trends as if she were chained to a chair and someone threatened to microwave her pets unless she adheres to the tropes as much as possible.
So, as usual, the heroine is an employee of the billionaire. Olivia Miller is a single mom and she doesn’t date anymore because her ex-husband slept with her best friend, and the gruesome twosome drugged her and called CPS on her so that they would take her daughter away.
Hence, every weekend she has to watch and seethe inside as her ex and her now ex-best friend get to spend time with Sammy. If only she had the leverage to launch an expensive but effective case against them in court! What, a billionaire wants to get into her pants? Perish that thought, as there is surely no benefit to that kind of fling!
Meanwhile, Fletcher Dufort has the hots for Olivia, but alas, the Dufort Hotel chain has this thing called Dufort Anti-Fraternization Policy, implemented because his father had so many sexual harassment complaints filed against him that the company was sued to pieces the turnover in the HR department was too much. It’s so comforting to know that these rules were set in place only because things became too bothersome for the people at the top of the food chain. Who says realism is dead in the romance genre?
So, our billionaire hero can’t do the pokey because of this policy.
Mind you, this story could have been easily resolved and be over in under 80 pages if these two would just shag and don’t tell anyone, if they were so convinced that this would be just a fling, but I suppose there’s no fun in a story if the heroine didn’t come up with self-sabotaging convoluted reasoning to keep the dong away from her.
Seriously, late in the story she would keep screeching about how horrible her ex is, how she needs to keep herself and her daughter safe from him, yadda yadda yadda, but at the same time she is swatting away the horny paws of a billionaire alpha male that only has to snap his fingers to make everything go his way.
She laments that she is limited options aside from not hooking up with Fletcher for good… look, if the author had some idea that this kind of romance heroine logic would do something, anything other than making Olivia appear to be an imbecile of the first order, I’m not seeing it.
Surely there has to be a better excuse to have the heroine to act like having a billionaire in her bed is such a hardship. I don’t know, how about giving her some kind of phobia of spending money, perhaps, or maybe an allergy to his skin or something?
Also, while I understand the need to keep reminding me, the reader, that the hero is so alpha that his penis extends past fifty inches and can shatter steel walls with its girth and hardness, Fletcher’s repetitive insistence that he needs to get his pee-pee inside Olivia gets really old after a few chapters.
That’s one issue I have with his side of the romantic equation: there is so much mental lusting and not enough finer feelings that I don’t buy the romance. It will be nice if the author had spent more words on him appreciating Olivia’s other traits and other aspects of her personality—a tall order, I know, considering the heroine’s lamentable mental faculties, but it will at least tell me that the heroine means more to Fletcher than a honey pot to stick his pee-pee into.
On the bright side, the story is easy to read and there are no jarring issues with the narrative style.
Still, as readable as this one is, there isn’t much here that makes it stand out from other stories with similar premises out there. Even the heroine being an idiot isn’t a unique selling point here, as there are way too many romance heroines out there that act like being courted by billionaires is a terrible hardship that they have to endure.
I know, I know, these tropes, stupidity of the romance heroine included, help shift titles and make money for the author, but come on, surely it shouldn’t this hard to find intelligent lifeforms in this genre?
