Kimani, $7.99, ISBN 978-1-335-47098-0
Contemporary Romance, 2019

Kyra Reed has always wanted Luke O’Connor ever since she was a teenager. He is, naturally, her brother’s BFF. When she was finally fed up that he wasn’t going to automatically bone her the moment she turned 18, she hatched a plan. Sure, he had never shown any interest in her and he treated her like a sister, but she had decided that he is her man, forever and ever, and she would have him. So, she lured him into her room under false pretenses and made her move on him.

You know, if we swap Kyra out for Carl Reed, the above would be genuinely creepy.

Luke caught himself at the hot kissy-kissy stage with Kyra, and to keep things from going any further, he told her some things like how she needed to mature a bit first before he would even consider her his type. Our heroine was hurt, because how dare a man turn her down.

Yeah, this is not creepy at all.

Then, it’s ten years later, and Kyra is one of the co-owners of Bare Sophistication. Luke is still hot, and he’s also a super-successful real estate agent. They have to exist in the same neighborhood again, and things get awkward fast.

Sherelle Green’s Her Christmas Wish revolves around how it is somehow wrong of Luke to not want to have sex with Kyra ten years ago. Our heroine holds a grudge, because to her, he has broken her heart ten years ago and she will never let him forget that. She wants to tease him, draw out their attraction, as some bizarre form of revenge on him.

I personally find it creepy when someone, male or female, acts super offended because they think they are entitled to sleep with someone they are attracted to, and the other person is somehow in the wrong for not reciprocating. I don’t even want to know that kind of person, and here I am expected to root for such a person because she’s the heroine. This entire story is based on this premise that Luke must somehow make amends by sticking it now into her, better late than never.

Such a premise would be pretty repugnant if it had been the hero holding such a point of view, and it’s no better when the heroine does it.

This story is also super artificial in that everyone here talks about how the hero and the heroine must hook up, how amazing it will be when they hook up, and how wonderful it would be when Kyra begins popping out Luke’s brats, and so forth. The result of this is that either these characters are all some cult members determined to recruit these two into their breeding program, or the author for some reason, after having written so many books, still believes that it doesn’t seem fake at all to have all the secondary characters act like authorial mouthpieces, and this entire story is like a gladiator match, only this time they are screaming “Shag! Shag! Shag!” instead of “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

There are a few moments when Luke talks to his parents about something that isn’t Kyra, and while his issues aren’t new, they could have provided some blessed respite from the constant “Luke! Eff her! Now!” nonsense that is the rest of the story. Alas, that part of the story is soon pushed aside for the secondary characters all but grabbing his long tablespoon and shoving it into Kyra’s entitled honey pot.

As for Kyra’s friends, they talk about her and Luke being joined at the crotch all the time, all the time. It’s like they have nothing else in their lives worth talking about, and they probably go to sleep dreaming of Luke and Kyra for some reason. I wonder whether this is shaping up to be some gotcha kind of story, where in the end it is revealed that everything is happening inside Kyra’s head, and in reality, she is all alone in a padded cell, humping a big pillow and crying out Luke’s name.

Sadly, I feel that I give this story far more thought than the author ever did.

The end result of all this is that Her Christmas Wish is the story of a creep that thinks she is entitled to the affections of any man she is attracted to, finally getting her wish even as her cult members egg Luke on like they wanted him to lie on the slab of stone and have Kyra shag him right before she plunges a knife into his heart and calls out some happy prayer to their dark deity.

Yet, somehow, this story is more frightening than what could have been if they had only wanted Luke to be the sacrifice at some sexy demon-worshiping ceremony.