Samhain Publishing, $2.50, ISBN 1-59998-592-6
Contemporary Erotica, 2007

Mackenzie McKade’s Take Me has one too many short paragraphs.

Of one sentence. Or maybe three sentences at most.

It can be very annoying, needless to say.

But then again, I probably shouldn’t expect more from it since it’s nothing more than some sex scenes held together by a paper-thin plot with some ménage à trois thrown in because it’s fashionable to do things in threes. In this case, the hero Cord Daily and the heroine Caitlyn Culver are in love and the third person is Cord’s cousin Dolan Crane.

A part me of wonders what kind of true love we are talking about here when the man happily invites a cousin along to play with the girlfriend. Is this story set in some kind of swinger community? I have no idea. Ms McKade just puts in the threesome scene as if having threesomes is something everyone does nowadays especially on Thanksgiving parties or whatever. No psychology, no character development, just a wham-bang-pass-the-Kleenex-ma’am type of story.

Oh yes, the story. Cord and Cait are in love, I am told, since she was sixteen and he was twenty. But her father threatened four years ago to drive the Daily ranch into bankruptcy if Cord or Dolan dared to sniff around Cait so Cord tried to keep away from her. Today, she is back in town with a vengeance, determined to play hard to get in order to land Cord. Only, her scheme backfires when Cord ropes in Dolan to corral her into some kinky games.

Towards the end of the story there is some issue about how Cait realizes that her father is a mean fellow and she loves Cord, but too much of this story focuses on sex scenes to the point that there is really nothing else about this story to write about.

Unfortunately for Ms McKade, I’m really not into “quickies”, “trysts”, or whatever they call these short smutty stories nowadays. I like my stories with some… well, stories. At any rate, any readers out there who want some quick titillation, knock yourself out. I’m looking for more than some forgettable ooh-la-la’s so I’ll just keep looking elsewhere. As with all things rushed and quick, I must say it has been a pretty forgettable and most disappointing experience.