Want Ad by Philippa Grey-Gerou & Emery Sanborne

TITLE: Want Ad
AUTHOR: Philippa Grey-Gerou & Emery Sanborne
PUBLISHER: Amber Heat
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 10k)
GENRE: Contemporary BDSM erotic romance
COST: $3.00

Stacia Lewis places an ad, looking for someone to explore bondage with her in a no-strings relationship. What she gets is a blind date with the bane of her professional existence, the antagonistic Will Sutton…

With short stories, it’s often hard to find much constructive to stay, especially when it’s essentially a single scenario that gets played out. In this case, we meet ad execs Stacia and Will, adversarial to the nth degree at work. Stacia loathes Will with a passion, from his attitude to his shallowness, but when he turns out to be her blind date for the ad she placed looking for someone to introduce her to bondage, she decides to go through with it rather than listen to him give her hell forever for being a chicken. Thus ensues the big bulk of the story, as he takes her upstairs and fulfills her desires.

As erotica, it’s not the lushest prose I’ve ever read, nor is it very original, but in spite of its rather terse quality, it has its own heat that makes the sex mostly work. The BDSM borders on too tasteful for me, though. He takes it very easy on her, starting with plain cuffs, moving to a simple spreader and a glass dildo. It all felt very restrained and proper. For such fiery temperaments outside of the bedroom, inside was a tad disappointing.

I didn’t like Will, though. I thought he was a jerk outside of the bedroom, and didn’t recognize him at all once they were behind closed doors. I kept waiting for this juxtaposition to be smoothed out or explained away or something, but it didn’t happen. Because of that, trying to believe in the ending was too hard. I would’ve had a much easier time of it if it had been left as erotica rather than attempting to find some sort of HFN.

Readability	8/10 – Simplistic but clean
Hero	4/10 – Too much of a jerk outside of the bedroom, I never saw the link or justification between his two different personas
Heroine	5/10 – Strong, but rather one-dimensional
Entertainment value	6/10 – The erotica was on the terse side but hot for what was there
World building	5/10 – Some attention is spent on their corporate world, but this is all about the sex
TOTAL:	28/50