AUTHOR: Christine d’Abo
PUBLISHER: Ellora’s Cave
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 14k)
GENRE: Contemporary erotic romance
COST: $2.99
Michael Quinn attends a sensual storyteller’s show, determined to find out if the mysterious Lady Phoenix is one of his co-workers. He doesn’t expect to respond so strongly to it, and returns to the office on Monday, dead-set on discovering her identity. Abbey has been in love and lust with Michael for most of their friendship, but when he unexpectedly turns up at her show, she decides to act out a little on her desire. Can it move beyond the make-believe into something real?
I don’t have a lot of faith that short stories professing to be erotic romance will do more than deliver on the hotness, so when I bought this particular story, I knew I was doing it purely for the smut. It has one of those blurbs that’s more a premise for eroticism than a real plot or romantic growth, and normally, I would have probably passed. But then I read the excerpt. It’s the opening of the story, and Michael is being blindfolded in a dark space in order to experience the sensual storytelling of Lady Phoenix. It doesn’t go far – only as far as her first line of dialogue – but what was there was a hot build-up with tight potential for the rest of the story.
That smut scene – and a later one where Michael jerked off in a unisex bathroom stall with Lady Phoenix masturbating on the other side of the door – followed through on that potential.
They were hot, kinkily so. Anyone with a voice fetish, or a blindfold kink, or the mysterious stranger adoration, would love them, I think. I actually fall into all three categories, which might be why these scenes worked so extremely well for me. The author kept the focus on the visceral, without extraneous clunky verbiage to distract from the intent of the scenes.
That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect story. It has the usual EC baggage when it comes to editing – wrong words, the occasional slip in tense – though this one isn’t nearly as bad as I’ve seen in other stories. It also never really gelled for me as a romance. Abbey has been in love with Michael for years, but we never really get a sense of personality for him to understand why. Then, out of the blue, Michael decides he’s attracted to Abbey, after he’s been searching for Lady Phoenix’s identity. I suppose the author might have meant it to mean that he was recognizing her within his friend, but I didn’t buy it. It just felt like a convenient device – and an unbelievable one, at that – to make sure she got her HEA.
Still, if this kind of kink hits your buttons, you could do a lot worse than buying this story. In spite of my reservations about the rest of it, I’ll probably re-read it again. It’s one of the few stories I’ve read that really hit the hot factor in regards to that particular kink.
| Readability | 7/10 – Editing issues as characterizes most EC books, but the first two smut scenes totally did it for me not to care too much about the errors. |
| Hero | 6/10 – I didn’t believe his turnaround, or really get that much of a sense of personality in the real world, but there wasn’t anything too annoying about him, either. |
| Heroine | 6/10 – Not enough space in the story to understand the different sides of her personality and make them cohesive. |
| Entertainment value | 7/10 – The first two smut scenes work so well for me that this is higher than the editing and sense of the story probably deserve. |
| World building | 7/10 – I never get a real sense of the contrast of her two worlds, exacerbated by the brevity of the story. |
| TOTAL: | 33/50 |
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