Cynthia Sax, $0.99
Contemporary Erotica, 2015
Arianna St James’s father hates Logan Ross with a passion. Naturally, she wants him with equal passion. Why shouldn’t she? He’s hot, loaded, rich, and screwing him will drive her daddy and her annoying half-siblings into an apoplexy. Our heroine, you see, is the product of an affair between her father and another woman while that man’s wife was very ill, and when the affair was exposed, the wife croaked. As you can guess, Arianna’s siblings aren’t exactly close to her.
At any rate, when the story opens, she has sent a message to Logan telling him that she would be his for a night of no-strings-attached fun. That way, she’d get him out of her system, and they can both move on with life in separate ways. Of course.
One reason I’m intrigued by One Night with My Billionaire Master is because the heroine has the moniker of the St James Slut. She’s supposed to be fast and loose, and ooh, I’d love to read about a heroine like that. Shortly into a few pages, it turns out that our heroine is just misunderstood and unfairly maligned, and that she is really not at all slutty, and my interest in this story deflates quickly, like a balloon pricked by a needle.
What follows is a standard story of not-at-all-scary so-called BDSM scenes followed by the heroine alternating between proclaiming just how much she magically trusts and adores Logan now and how she will be destroyed by her step-siblings if they ever found out what Logan did to her rear end. God, if that is the case, then don’t shag him – simple, right? Go raise and offer her hiney to someone else if she is that horny, how hard is that to do?
But no, we need some filler conflict to claim that this is a romance story rather than, eeuw, smut and this story therefore ends up being neither here nor there. The story line is too short to be worth anything, the sex scene is too much like a “written based on the manual” thing to offer titillation, and the characters are vaguely human-shaped cut-outs made from pages from EL James’s books. Is it readable? Well, yes, all the sentences are crafted in proper order. Is it worth reading? I suppose it will do when one really has nothing else to do.
