Ellora’s Cave, $6.49, ISBN 978-1419911897
Contemporary Erotica, 2007
Mandy Miller wakes up one morning without her knickers on, and oh, look, there’s a hot shirtless man over there. Oh no, has she, a single woman, had sex with the hottest man she has ever seen the night before? Oh no, that is the worst thing ever. No, it’s not bad because she was clearly drunk when she put out, it’s because she is not that kind of girl, you know, and you know, when it comes to heroines in naughty stories that put out six thousand ways, all day and any day, it is very important that readers do not perceive that heroine as easy or anything like that.
Meanwhile, the hero Joe Paloma… okay, this is not the author’s fault, but I immediately connect that name to Lou Paloma, the cartoon villain played by Bruce McGill in that episode in Tales from the Crypt, and as much as I adore Mr McGill, he is not what I’d call a man whose looks make me want to lose my knickers just like Mandy lost hers, and I can’t help seeing Lou Paloma’s face as the hero’s each time I see that name on the page.
Still, Joe is a nice guy. He’s a very nice guy.
But he shouldn’t ignore the fact that she assumed they’d already slept together. It might be giving him an unfair advantage. He should probably tell her that all she’d done was drink too much tequila, pass out on the pavement outside the club and then ride home with him in a cab. He should probably tell her that he’d only taken off her jeans so she could sleep more comfortably, that he had never dreamed that she wouldn’t be wearing underwear, or a bra for that matter. Most women he knew wore underpants. It was a given. It was an honest mistake that he’d discovered that she didn’t and that the discovering had made him ten times as wild for her as he was before.
So, the woman passed out, and he brought her home with him, put her in his bed, and took off her jeans. It’s too bad that I see Lou Paloma’s face as Joe’s, or else he’d be hot, and you know how romance readers are supposed to be. So long as the man is hot and rich, there is nothing he can do to the heroine that can be considered creepy, abusive, or beyond the pale. Alas, Lou Paloma is neither rich nor hot, so I automatically clamp my thighs shut and find this story an instant turn-off.
Okay, I’m kidding, but seriously though, is our hero so socially stunted that he believes it is perfectly fine to take off a woman’s pants when she was unconscious and then let her imagine that they have slept together? What’s the point?
Well, I can ask that about Love Fool too. This was part of now-dead Ellora Cave’s Torrid Tarot line, and I can only imagine that the acquisition editor probably had a hundred slots to fill before a certain date, and hence, any story would do. This is because, honestly, there isn’t much story here at all. Despite Joe being so hot that she can barely refrain from performing a spinning bird kick on his pee-pee again, she just can’t! She can’t! Well, that’s what she says anyway. Despite wanting to do a super hadoken from his pee-pee onto Mandy, Joe just can’t, because he had a bad divorce, so he just can’t!
Well, that’s what the two of them say anyway, but they still do it, so I don’t know why I am supposed to care about their antics outside of the boink bonanza moments. They are already doing it, so all the tedious whining and whinging come off as a lazy effort to pad the pages with something that isn’t tab A vigorously being inserted over and over into slot B. Oh, so they are scared of love and being hurt again? Uh, they have already skipped the preliminaries straight to third base, so the whole thing is like complaining about being scared to date someone when you’ve already gone all the way with that someone ten times and counting. They have already put out, so they can shut up, if they have nothing better to do other than to make me roll up my eyes.
The sex thing isn’t very interesting either. It’s all mostly vanilla stuff, nothing that really gets me to sit up and go, “That’s hot!” I feel that a big reason for this is because the characters are so bland and mildly annoying, I end up having zero interest in following them into bed. Mind you, I’ve read stories in which I detest the main characters but I still find their sex scenes too hot for words, but sadly, this isn’t the case here. Such scenes have a by-the-number feel to them, and for the most part, I’m as bored by these characters boinking as them whinging.
The entire plot and romance and everything else about Love Fool can be summed up as “Who cares?”, and really now. who cares indeed.
