Liquid Silver Books, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-59578-425-4
Contemporary Romance, 2008
Hmm, from the cover art I thought I would be getting a lesbian interracial romance in Nadia Aidan’s Sweet Revenge. Oops, this one is actually a more straightforward boy-and-girl thing.
Ryan Dumont has written the script for Nemesis, which from descriptions given seems to be an erotic romantic comedy, and he intends to direct it as well. Our heroine Teresa Montague hopes to secure the role of the main heroine so she’s off to meet the mysterious writer and director for lunch in an exclusive LA restaurant. She has no idea at first that Ryan is a man with a thing for her.
Exactly how Ryan Dumont remembered Teresa Montague from high school. At thirty-four, he had spent the last sixteen years waiting for this moment, the moment when he would finally bring the Ms. Haughty Teresa Montague to her knees… literally. He couldn’t wait to have her right there with her face in his crotch and her full lips wrapped around his cock, sucking him dry as he spurted his seed down her lovely and elegant throat. The mere thought of it made him painfully hard, so hard he had to adjust himself under the table. The Zanzibar wasn’t the sort of place where gentlemen were expected to sport boners, no matter how beautiful the woman they were meeting for lunch.
How romantic.
Ryan would readily admit to himself that he had always been one of her many adoring fan – probably her most adoring one – but that was something he had never admitted to her. For some reason she had never been able to get along with him – except that one time. That time was emblazoned on his memory, and had been for sixteen years.
Say what? What kind of pathetic man would spend sixteen years obsessing over a high school acquaintance? Didn’t Stephen King write a book about this fellow’s equally crazy sister which was later made into a movie starring Kathy Bates?
It gets worse. Ryan wants her to sleep with him to get the role, and when she refuses, he makes sure that she can’t get a decent gig again – a rather implausible occurrence, if you ask me, given that he hasn’t even directed a movie before. Things go downhill from here, and it never gets any better as the two characters are still shouting at each other one page before a forced happy ending shows up to close the story.
Teresa isn’t a bad heroine at all, but for some reason the author seems to believe that Ryan is a nice catch. Oh, perhaps, if we’re still in 1983 and authors hoping to be the next Rosemary Rogers are frantically making romance heroes out of various male sex offenders. But we aren’t in 1983 anymore and I am not the type to write love letters to men behind bars, so I’m afraid Sweet Revenge is completely wrong for me.
