Lauren Smith, $0.99, ISBN 978-1-952063-32-9
Contemporary Romance, 2020
Now, people, don’t get too excited. The bloke in Lauren Smith’s Penthouse Prince isn’t an actual prince or even a billionaire. Instead, he’s that guy staying that the penthouse that makes a racket each time he’s at home.
She had moved in two months ago, and nearly every night she heard distinctive sexual sounds from the penthouse above her that left little doubt as to what was going on up there. The women in that apartment came and went in revolving-door fashion, but the man—some hotshot real estate developer—was the one who actually lived there.
Either those people in that penthouse are exhibitionists or the people that built that place cut corners and used paper to make the floors and walls.
Of course, that fellow is not annoying at all, because he’s hot and I assume loaded, and hence, whatever he does makes sensible women moist down below.
His name is Beckham Ellicott. The author tells me that he resembles David Beckham. I am sure that there is a pattern in there somewhere that will uncover the deepest secrets of the universe, but I’m more concerned about the possibility that the hero sounds like David Beckham. That will be most unfortunate.
Anyway, when the story opens, he shows up naked with only a dish towel over his pee-pee to ask our heroine Poppy Ashford if he could borrow her phone.
Instead of worrying that he may stick the phone up his ass during some depraved sex games, she hands him her phone right away, no questions asked, because he’s hot. I mean, that makes sense. A smart woman always obeys a hot man, no matter what he is asking of her!
Still, the guy comes down the next day to ask her out for fun and games, and before I know it, they are in love. I assume Poppy will move in with Becks for her happily ever after on the bed and furniture and god knows what else that he had ooh-ed and aah-ed with his many, many conquests in the past.
Eh. If I were her, I’d have the whole place fumigated and every surface disinfected first before I even step foot in that penthouse of depravity, but maybe it’s just me becoming a germaphobe and cootie-phobe as I become more advanced in age.
Anyway, this is a superficial story with a romance that is as deep as a puddle. It’s only love because he’s hot and she for some reason is so turned on by the ooh-ooh-aah upstairs that she wants to star in her own The Red Shoe Diaries episode with him.
Sadly, this thing isn’t a salacious horny-horn story, more like a pornographic film only with all the fun bits somehow missing and one has to make do with the super awkward opening set-up moments instead.
I’m hard pressed to come up with even one good reason why one should read this thing, in other words. Maybe because it’s cheap?
Still, there are many other stories out there that are just as cheap but don’t make the hero resemble a penis-shaped Petri dish containing some of the most virulent strains of STD pathogens known to mankind.
