Avon is offering a free PDF short story – and I realize this has been news for a few days now, so my apologies for the late breaking-ness.
Deeper Than Desire is a free companion short story to Caroline Linden’s December release, For Your Arms Only.
It’s about 48 pages, and while it makes giant jumps in time and moves quickly through the sequence of history that affects the hero and heroine, it also sets up the family and backstory of the December book. If you read it, let me know what you think.
Spoilery!
HOly shit did it make big jumps. That being said, I didn’t hate it. It was a little…soft…for me. with the exception of the time with Callie’s first husband, everything seemed to me to be all coated with sugar, if you get what i mean. I don’t really know how to describe it better…It just wasn’t as *real* feeling as it could have been. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the “oh I’ve loved you all along” on her part. Cuz while Tom was obviously entranced by her (although he is kind of a total wimp, SOME romance heroes would have taken her, father be damned), you never see her as being any more than polite to him, and then she’s all, oh. Yeah. this must be love! I don’t know, I just wasn’t satisfied by that. On top of that, she’s spent years being abused—in most worlds, that would make her very unlikely to have sex again at the drop of a hat. No matter the chemistry or whatever, no matter if it’s been a while since Julian died, I would have expected her to at least SAY something to Tom, have some hesitation, some “what if all guys like what Julian liked?” moment where he’d have to win her over. but no.
Maaaaaybe as a book it would be better? I don’t know. I won’t write the author off, but there were just plot holes in this that maybe were because of the format but I don’t know.
Does that woman on the cover look like Sophia Loren to you? She does to me.
Spoilers ho!
Too easy. If you’re going to write a story as short as that, you can’t have the years-of-abuse angle. Sure, she had years to “recover” after it, but there’s no recovery – instead she keeps on in her frozen state until her sister gives her a shock. And then she’s immediately ready not only to get into a new relationship but to take the initiative in declaring herself. When the only character traits she’s been given are meekness & passivity, that…Does. Not. Work.
If her first husband had been cold & distant instead of abusive, and if she had merely tried to signal availability rather than out-and-out propositioning the hero, then I think it could have worked. As written though, :bzzt!: Sorry, thank you for playing. It doesn’t give me any interest in buying the companion book.
It totally left me cold. I don’t like weak women who won’t fight for what they want and a weak man is even worse. No desire to see what happens to the other sister. The story never really kept my interest at any point. It was all rather blah.
I’m going to be weird and say it was OK, considering she’s covering so much ground in so little space. The heroine is a weenie but that’s what being an obedient daughter was in those days. Besides, it was free.
Spoiler alert
I was hoping she had killed that old goat (the mean husband, not the other goat) instead of Natural Causes and was going to take over the business like Scarlett O’Hara, that she grew a pair. The abuse issue made the sex scene a little hard to believe, but behold the power of the Mighty Wang o’ Loving. It’s also stretching the bounds of belief that a dude would be happy to just sit and look at her for ten freaking years, especially a soldier, who’s undoubtedly had plenty of other opportunities.
Maybe if Candy helped around a bit more, then you wouldn’t be so far behind.
I’m sorry to say that my uncontrollable giggles about the hero being introduced as ‘jerking off’ his left me unable to proceed to a more serious review of the story…
hmnmn, it was, well, readable. It didn’t turn me OFF, but it didn’t do much for me either. I didn’t really get any sense of deep emotion from it, and that’s what I read romance for. The opening was promising but it didn’t really deliver. The heroine seemed to lack emotion and initiative until the very end, and then more space was spent on sex than establishing the relationship or her change in attitude—every word counts in a short story and this one wasted them on a long sex scene more appropriate for a 300-page book. I haven’t read anything else from this author before—some authors just *do* better with longer length works, and this author may be one of them—but this made me think for the full book “library, maybe, if they ever get it” instead of “buy on day of release.”
Websites are always helpful in one way or the other, anyways, mcsa certification a good way to get started to renovate your dreams into the world of reality.
Thanks
Micheal,