Black Heart Publication, $4.99
Contemporary Erotica, 2019
Our hero Garrick is everything a modern woman would want in a man to love and settle down with. He practically stalks our heroine Clarissa, his favorite act of courtship being his constant texting of her when she’s out and about in town. No man is allowed to get a sniff of bloomers when he can’t, you know.
He wanted to tell her, to show her, but if he brought up sex, she clammed up and changed the subject. He would consider her a prude; except he’d borrowed her lap top a few times to check his email while hanging at her apartment. The woman didn’t know the first thing about hiding her history, or at least closing the browsers before offering someone the computer.
Awesome. Measha Stone certainly knows how to craft a hero after my heart in Unzoned.
Our possessive romantic hunk of meat has a reason to be concerned, because Clarissa is indeed on a mission to find a Dom to give her the solid whack of love in the rump. She lets her more outgoing friend convince her to visit Dark Lace, the hottest BDSM club in Chicago, but our hero is on to her due to his gentlemanly stalker ways.
Of course, he’d never tell her what he saw. Although it took more power than he would have guessed he had to keep from tearing the thing in half when he saw her half filled out profile on collar-me. No fucking way that was going to happen. If she was going to become active in the community, start actually searching out what she wanted, she wasn’t going to start meeting up with random guys from the Internet.
The rest of the story is predictable. He schools her, whacks her a bit here and there, and she’s all “Oh, this is so scary! I don’t know if I can keep doing this!”, but then she remembers that she’s always had a crush on him anyway, plus he’s super rich and hot, so yeah, he’s quite the catch even if he probably had every room in the house rigged with secret cameras and he had set people to spy on her every move when he’s not around because he doesn’t trust her not to be a super slut in his absence…
Where was I? Oh yes, what a dream guy. This is certainly the erotic romance of the century.
Okay, I’m going to be nice here and give this one three oogies because I can’t deny that this is a readable story. The narrative style is serviceable, the pacing is fine, the sex scenes are okay even I feel like I’d read variations of these things so many times already, and the whole thing, on paper, is a pretty okay read.
It’s just that the hero is pure ick. This makes the act of turning every page a test of nerves as I try not to grimace too hard and make my skin file for divorce.
Under any other circumstances, this guy would turn out to be the abusive psycho ex found in every other Lifetime woman-in-distress movie, but here he’s the hero. Go figure.
