AUTHOR: Loribelle Hunt
PUBLISHER: Cobblestone Press
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 14k)
GENRE: Contemporary erotic romance
COST: $3.99
MP Sergeant First Class Janey Foster is done with controlling men. Until she meets the perfect physical specimen in Captain Jake Turner. She breaks all her personal rules for a weekend of passion, but when his behavior afterward borders on the same lines as her ex-husband’s, Janey breaks it off. Can Jake convince her that he’s not the man she thinks he is?
I can’t answer that question for Janey, but I can answer it for myself. A big fat no. I love my big alpha heroes, but only when they’re done well. This starts out promisingly, with some delicious description of Jake’s physique. I can even stick with it for that first weekend of hot sex. It’s not the most erotic thing I’ve ever read, but it was solid enough not to have me cringing.
Then Janey goes out for dinner with a male friend. Friend, being the operative word here. Not a date. And Jake turns into a possessive, Neanderthal jerk. And I can’t blame her when she shoves him to the side.
What truly weakens this story is that the author then chooses to skip a year into the future. I frowned when I saw the note about the time jump at the top of chapter three, but I figured, “Hey, maybe Janey hasn’t seen him in a year. After all, she was getting deployed.” But no, that wasn’t the case. What’s actually happened is that Janey and Jake have been in contact that entire time, and the reader is brought back into the story after she’s already decided she’s in love with him. The entire romance part of the story – the convincing Janey he wasn’t a jerk, the wooing, the deepening of Janey’s feelings – is condensed into just a few paragraphs. The author robs the reader of any sort of development in favor of either meeting a word limitation or to get to the good stuff, neither of which is justifiable when you’re calling yourself an erotic romance.
Kind of hard to recommend something as a romance when there isn’t any romance in it.
| Readability | 7/10 – Solid enough, though my intolerance for headhopping and the occasional error bugged me. |
| Hero | 5/10 – Started out well, but the rapid descent into Neanderthal made it very difficult to like him after he attempts to save himself in the heroine’s eyes. |
| Heroine | 5/10 – Not enough there for me to believe or understand why she’d want to be with the jerk |
| Entertainment value | 4/10 – Brevity robs the story of the romance when the author completely skips over the entire time needed to redeem the hero. |
| World building | 8/10 – The backdrop of the military seems relatively real to me. |
| TOTAL: | 29/50 |
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