Alyse Zaftig, $3.99, ISBN 978-1005713386
Contemporary Romance, 2022

Don’t be fooled by the title Tempting Her Dad’s Best Friend, as this is not some erotic tale of some saucy young lady wanting to get it on with her daddy’s BFF.

No, the BFF in question is Sergei. He’s an undercover agent that has befriended Arseny, a leader of the local mafia, as part of a plan to take down the Russian mob boss.

However, his plan experiences a hitch when Cleo Dawkins shows up to announce to Arseny that she is his secret daddy, and she has finally tracked him down after going through her now dead mom’s possessions and learned that mommy liked her kolbasa a lot.

Of course, Cleo does the usual “I traveled all the way to a faraway country and am too broke to just go back” stunt beloved of romance heroines, so she’s stuck here no matter what. She’s also woefully oblivious to her father being a crime boss.

Meanwhile, Arseny is convinced that Cleo must be up to some no good trick because he’s confident that her American fling had aborted their kid ages ago. He can’t take a DNA test, because remember, he’s the bad guy and he can’t advertise his presence nilly-willy to the public.

Thus, he wants Sergei to get close to this woman and figure out whether Cleo is the real deal or a swindling hussy.

Because subtlety is dead, though, and we don’t have time for silly things like building up of attraction and sexual tension, Sergei immediately starts having erotic dreams of Cleo going down on him.

“Breathe when I pull out.” I started hammering her mouth. I knew that she was young and inexperienced, but the fantasy version of her could take it like a pro. She swallowed everything down as I exploded into her mouth.

Romance is alive and well, people!

So, the rest of the story sees Sergei taking Cleo around town, going to lovely dinners and evening shows because this is such an exciting undercover agent story like that. The author then remembers that the couple will need to do something romance novel-y, like getting married, so she has these two have sex and, voila, pregnant.

Now they have to get married, they do, and that’s it. Romance.

This story would have worked anyway if the undercover agent part had been removed, because the author would then just need to come up with another flimsy reason to force the hero and the heroine together. 

In the end, this thing is basically a bullet train speeding through four stops—instant lust, sex, pregnant, marriage—and everything in between these stops is perfunctory fill-in-the-blank tropes that exist just to rush the couple from stop to stop.

While it may be unfair to call the author lazy, as I’m sure writing this thing requires some effort, the plotting and characterization and the whole romance thing sure feel that way.