Giselle Renarde, $0.99, ISBN 978-1310790317
Contemporary Erotica, 2014

When Riley arrives at his new law firm in Toronto, the receptionist Navina isn’t impressed. He is dressed in khaki shorts and T-shirt, and cycles too. She thinks he’s a courier or something. Then, when he shows up in proper suit and tie, looking like a million Trudeau dollars, she feels like wanting to do a sexy spinning bird kick on him. Sure, he lectures her when she shows up in a jacket with rabbit trim, because he’s anti-fur and all, but that’s okay, he makes her feel like a moist chocolate cake all over, so that’s fine.

I don’t know. He’s a lawyer. Sure, he may dry hump a tree and French kiss bunnies in his free time, but he is a lawyer. I’m not talking about a public attorney defending the downtrodden or anything like that, mind you, but a freaking rich lawyer that probably gets his wealth from abetting wealthy corporate scumbags in money laundering or some crap.

So, he takes her out the woods one day, and she puts out and gets his wood. That’s all.

Between Riley and the tree, she felt sandwiched by two magnificent lovers, and she knew that was strange but she didn’t care.

All I can think of when I read that scene is ouch. Having sex against a tree ranks even lower than sex on a beach when it comes to things that tend to seem better in stories and movies than in real life. In real life, it’s one minute of fumbling and ten minutes of wincing and adjusting oneself and checking for uncomfortable bits and scrapes on tender regions.

I’m more perturbed by how easy Navina changes her entire view of life to accommodate Riley’s just because she wants him bad. He lectures her on what she should be wearing, and she tears up because what he says makes so much sense and his words just pierce her heart like she wants his pee-pee so badly to pierce another bit of hers. Her back scraped against a tree bark is so sexy because he’s shagging and because he loves nature, she now loves it, yay.

This relationship is not going to end up in a happy place, I tell you. Navina seems frighteningly easy to manipulate, and Riley is a high-handed nag and very likely a hypocritical ass too, given his role-playing as a conscientious tree-hugging Mr Greta Thunberg when he is a freaking lawyer.

If the author had wanted to really drive home issues like saving nature and other how-dare-you issues in Tree Hugger, she should have gone all the way and had Riley being a minimalist back-to-nature mountain man that eschews everything related to environment-polluting, soul-destroying technology. Ah, but that will break the whole “romance only happens with wealthy men” fantasy, right? Still, the author can’t have the cake and eat it too, not in this instance.

This one comes with a bonus story, how nice. Naked in a Moving Vehicle—is a good idea to pair this fuel-guzzling premise with a tree-hugging one?—which sees a couple rekindling their long marriage by doing it in a car just like they were when they were teens. Only, this time it’s extra special because the vehicle is still moving when the earth moved.

Sigh, I think I’m really getting old or losing my spark because when I read this one, I keep thinking of how uncomfortable it can be to do all that sexy maneuvering in a vehicle, unless it’s one of those spacious expensive ones with no roofs so that arms and legs can stretch out as comfortably as possible, and I also find myself waiting for them to hit an incoming truck.

The erotic elements in Tree Hugger is fine, hence the three oogies. Then again, the premise that these elements come wrapped up in, let’s just say that they are not the most environmentally sound type, if the environment we were talking about here is the one in the brain.