Bone Deep by Summer Alan

TITLE: Bone Deep
AUTHOR: Summer Alan
PUBLISHER: Cobblestone Press
LENGTH: Novella (roughly 27k)
GENRE: Contemporary erotic romance
COST: $4.99

Flight attendant Hailey Rockwell has just been told by her pilot boyfriend that he needs time to think about their relationship. Rushing off into the rain, she gets intercepted by his best friend and fellow pilot, Kevin, and a kiss shared in the rain has her wondering just what she needs to forget about being dumped. Kevin has been attracted to Hailey since meeting her, and when his buddy asks for help in dealing with her, he is more than happy to oblige. Neither expects a night to simply forget to develop into something more, though…

I’m so annoyed right now, I’m not even sure where to start. I bought this book because the excerpt was a kiss in the rain, and the blurb suggested slightly illicit sex. This promised to hit a lot of my kinks and then some. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Before I’d finished the first chapter, I was back re-reading the blurb to see if there was something I had missed. Because see, I wasn’t expecting Kevin to be doing this with an ulterior motive in mind. What the blurb didn’t say is that Hailey has been duped by her so-called boyfriend. He never told her he was married, while he told his buddy Kevin that Hailey was okay with the arrangement. All the way until he wanted time off to go boink another conquest, and he concocted a story for Kevin that Hailey was threatening to tell his wife about the affair. So really, I got duped, too. This wasn’t the story I’d wanted to read. That’s not always a problem, if the story can rise above it, but in this case, it really, really doesn’t.

Hailey and Kevin are idiots. For her part, Hailey knows something is wrong with her year-long relationship with her pilot boyfriend and gets excited about a week-long trip to Paris in order to fix what was wrong and feel like a “princess” for him. When she thinks he’s dumping her, however, she all of a sudden decides she’s in love with him and is devastated by this turn of events. She starts crying on the way out to her car – this prince of a pilot did it on the return of their work-flight from Paris – so when Kevin intercepts her – after she’s broken the strap on her purse and dropped it in a puddle – she’s a wreck. When she kisses him for the first time, she starts crying again. And stops kissing him even though the author has made sure to tell us, she noticed how the sadness permeating her soul seemed to shrink, to dissipate in the strength of his arms and the cool, falling rain. It’s shortcut writing, and it did nothing to endear me to either of her characters at all.

Then there’s Kevin. I have no idea how anybody could think this was a good plan: All he had to do was get her to forget about David and consider him. If he could open that door, David would take care of the rest on his end. Seriously. Let’s not forget to mention he thinks Hailey is a slut. According to everything he knows about her – everything his friend has told him – Hailey has no qualms sleeping with married men. So when Hailey instigates a kiss in the parking lot, he automatically goes to, “Oh, she’s a slut.” But then, when he’s got her pinned to the hood of her car, wanting to fuck her, all she has to do is say, “I’m on birth control,” and they got at it bareback. If he thinks she’s a slut, why in hell would he have unprotected sex? Even if he doesn’t think she’s a slut, he knows his friend sleeps around. If he had half a brain, he’d want protection.

All of this occurred in the first chapter. I never got over how stupid these two were to really get into the rest of the story. It doesn’t help that the characterization is all over the place, or that there seems to be every sex variation in the book in it. At one point, sweet and nice Kevin goes all Dom on Hailey and spanks her with a wooden spoon. Later on, they have sex on rose petals on her bed. By that point, I was rolling my eyes and asking myself, “What’s next? David comes in for a threesome?”

Frankly, it wouldn’t have surprised me.

Readability	6/10 – Minor editing errors and clichés left and right make this the longest 27k I’ve read in a while.
Hero	4/10 – An idiot. Any man who thinks a woman is a manipulative slut, and yet, has bareback sex on the hood of her car in the rain based purely on her avowal she’s on birth control, is an idiot.
Heroine	2/10 – Whiny, clingy, and dumb only begin to cover this woman’s faults.
Entertainment value	3/10 – This should have hit all my kinks. Instead, I spent more time rolling my eyes and screaming at my monitor.
World building	5/10 – Middling.
TOTAL:	20/50