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Trashed
Trashed by Mia Hopkins is $2.99! This is part of Hopkins’ Eastside Brewery series. Though I haven’t read any of Hopkins’ titles, I will say they get routinely recommended at my romance book club and I know Aarya has good things to say about them. But FYI, I believe this book is told through the hero’s POV
He burns for her. Lucky for him, she likes to play with fire. . .
My name is Eddie Rosas, but everyone calls me Trouble. Since I got out of prison six months ago, I’ve had one goal: find my father, whatever the cost. My older brother says I need to move on. He also wants me to leave our gang, East Side Hollenbeck, and go straight, but I can’t–not until I uncover the truth about our family and its missing piece.
One problem? I’m distracted. My distraction’s name is Carmen Centeno. Smart, passionate, and tough as hell, Carmen is a woman from the neighborhood who’s built her career as one of the city’s top chefs. She’s a master of creating pleasure both in and out of bed. But when our connection deepens, how can I show her I’m not the trash everyone says I am?
The pressure’s rising. Carmen deserves a man she can depend on. And when the ghosts of my past rise up, I’ll have to outsmart them–or lose my shot at a future with the only woman who believes in me.
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Show Up
Show Up by Renee Dahlia is 99c! This is a F/F romance that Tara mentioned in December’s Hide Your Wallet. Look at all these tropes! You get a trope! And you get a trope! Everybody gets a trope!
A fake date … a real secret
An invitation to her ex’s wedding is the icing on a crappy cake for burlesque dancer Yolande. Her ex ghosted her just as they were about to take the stage for their neo-burlesque act. Yolande’s friends at Seraph’s Burlesque Club persuade her that attending will show her ex that she’s moved on. She just needs a date.
Shy bartender Reiko has a secret, or two. She can’t risk anyone discovering that her life as a penniless PhD student and bartender is a sham. And even though she’s been in love with Yolande since forever, when Yolande needs a plus-one to save face at her ex’s wedding, Reiko knows any fantasy of romance is just that – fantasy. Yolande will never notice the way Reiko looks at her.
When the drama of the wedding reveals a spark of attraction between them, Reiko will have to risk her fake identity for the hope of real love.
– found family
– fake dating
– friends to lovers
– only one bed
– lesbian romanceAdd to Goodreads To-Read List →
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The Tyrant Alpha’s Rejected Mate
The Tyrant Alpha’s Rejected Mate by Cate C. Wells is FREE!! This one was mentioned on a recent Hide Your Wallet and I remember several of you being very interested in this one. Did y’all pick it up?
He rejected me, and then he realized I’m the center of his world. Bummer.
Una
I keep my head down. In this backwards pack, females rank low, and my bad leg makes me damaged goods. It doesn’t help that I’ve never shifted. I don’t mind the late twenties single life, though. No one’s paying any attention as I build an illicit farmer’s market empire.My roomies and I are doing it for ourselves, and if life under Killian Kelly is stifling, at least it’s predictable. We can deal.
But when biology finally kicks in, I lose my mind. I claim our alpha as my mate. And he rejects me in front of the whole pack.
It’s all good. It only hurts when I breathe. I’ll survive. That’s what I do.Who wants an arrogant jerk for a mate, anyway? I’ve got a business to run.
Killian
To lead this pack out of the dark ages, I’ve had to be hard. Merciless. I don’t flinch, and I don’t make mistakes.Una Hayes isn’t my mate.
My wolf might have some kind of strange infatuation, but if she were mine, I’d know it. And I can walk away, can’t I?
And if I keep coming back? If she starts living in my head?I’m the strongest male in five generations. My pack scrambles to do my bidding. I can bring one quiet female back in line. No one can possibly be as stubborn as I am.
There’s no way I’ve ruined the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
I’m the Quarry pack alpha. I don’t lose.
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Longbourn
Longbourn by Jo Baker is $1.99! This book divided some of the Bitches. Carrie gave it gave it an A, while Sarah gave it a D. Which camp are you in? Did you love it or hate it?
A brilliantly imagined, irresistible below-stairs answer to Pride and Prejudice: a story of the romance, intrigue and drama among the servants of the Bennet household, a triumphant tale of defying society’s expectations, and an illuminating glimpse of working-class lives in Regency England.
The servants at Longbourn estate–only glancingly mentioned in Jane Austen’s classic–take centre stage in Jo Baker’s lively, cunning new novel. Here are the Bennets as we have never known them: seen through the eyes of those scrubbing the floors, cooking the meals, emptying the chamber pots. Our heroine is Sarah, an orphaned housemaid beginning to chafe against the boundaries of her class. When the militia marches into town, a new footman arrives under mysterious circumstances, and Sarah finds herself the object of the attentions of an ambitious young former slave working at neighboring Netherfield Hall, the carefully choreographed world downstairs at Longbourn threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, up-ended. From the stern but soft-hearted housekeeper to the starry-eyed kitchen maid, these new characters come vividly to life in this already beloved world. Jo Baker shows us what Jane Austen wouldn’t in a captivating, wonderfully evocative, moving work of fiction.
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I loved THE TYRANT ALPHA’S REJECTED MATE—it was one of my favorites of 2021–and highly recommend it, even if you don’t like shifter romances. I’ve read several other Wells books since then and, regardless of genre, she really excels at presenting gritty, unsentimental stories featuring flawed heroes who want to do better but sometimes lack the emotional bandwidth to do so without occasional blunders: they’re imperfect but not irredeemable.
I downloaded Tyrant Alpha’s Rejected Mate if only to find out what an “illicit farmer’s market empire” entails.
@Bitsy: it’s not a huge part of the plot, but the “illicit farmer’s market” shows how enterprising the heroine (and several other unmated females who live in the same house) are.
Omg Bitsy read my mind lol.
I, too, enjoyed THE TYRANT ALPHA’S REJECTED MATE after hearing about it here.
For Regency period romance readers, Michelle Diener’s “A Dangerous Madness” is free on Amazon thru Feb 14th. I enjoyed all of her Regency romances but couldn’t get into her SciFi books.
More thumbs up for THE TYRANT ALPHA’S REJECTED MATE. I’m looking forward to the sequel, THE HEIR APPARENT’S REJECTED MATE (ETA April 22).
I also recommend her other series STEEL BONES MC & its spinoff STONECUT COUNTY.
The “illicit farmer’s market empire” is the best niche empire in romance since a book whose corporate heroine ran a “cat toy empire.” Here’s to weird imperialism (better than the real thing)!
Thought process I just had: “Hmm, THE TYRANT ALPHA’S REJECTED MATE. The title is a bit much. And I’m not really huge into shifter books unless they are written by Ilona Andrews. Let me click through and see what the Smart Bitches comments say….OH, DiscoDollyDeb liked it!” ::immediate download:: Thanks for all your service to this community, @DDD!
I loved both Trashed and The Tyrant Alpha’s Rejected Mate! A word to the wise: Cate C. Wells writes utterly absorbing romances but you may want to check out content warnings first as she tends to wade into gritty territory and there is often violence. In The Tyrant Alpha’s Rejected Mate, Una is disabled. She was attacked at age 7 when she tried to save a baby from being killed and it never healed properly. She’s dealt with a lot ableism from the pack (including her love interest Killian), as well as her own internalized ableism. There’s more beyond that but it delves into spoiler territory. Again, I loved the story and thought she made some game-changing choices for PNR.
Ashlin & Olivia by Aster Glenn Gray is on sale for 99 cents! It’s a lovely chaste ex-friends to lovers FF romance. They reconnect over art while in Florence, Italy!
Shifters aren’t really my thing, but something about the heroine building an illicit farmer’s market empire sounds appealing.
There were parts of Longbourn I enjoyed, but overall I was disappointed. I thought many of the P&P characters were made worse in ways that made plot-sense but not sense-sense – Elizabeth was one, but even more so a bit of backstory involving Mr. Bennet that didn’t make sense given his love of indolence and hatred of drama.
Combine that with too many servants with too many tragic backstories to really address them all, plus a big section that veers from Austen to O’Brian. I would have liked it better if it had been less ambitious, I think, or had some of the dangling elements trimmed back.
Picked up Tyrant Alpha’s when I also bought Morning Glory Milking Farm. The recommendations from my fellow commenters are always great — thank you!
@KB: thank you for your kind words.
@hng23: I’m also looking forward to THE HEIR-APPARENT’S REJECTED MATE. And I read the first two books of Wells’s Stonecut County series (HITTING THE WALL and AGAINST THE WALL). I’m going to totally squee about HITTING THE WALL in the next WAYR—it’s my first five-star read of 2022. I think Wells is really doing something interesting with the romance-novel paradigm, in part because of how much her heroes have to learn and grow emotionally (her heroines experience emotional growth too, but not at the rate and depth as her heroes).
If the DDD seal of approval for the Wells book wasn’t enough, the first review (Rhawna) on the US Amazon site would clinch it. LOL
@DDD: Book 3 will be THE LONE ALPHA’S REJECTED MATE (no ETA yet); the trope will be age-gap. I’m looking forward to seeing how she handles this.
I hope you read the Steel Bones series before the Stonecut County books; that’s where the backstories are.
I *just* read HITTING THE WALL and it was only after I was looking for the next book in the series that I realized it was by Cate C Wells. I read HITTING THE WALL directly after reading Jennifer Crusie’s WELCOME TO TEMPTATION, and now I have a wonderful Pomplamoossian mash-up of these two wonderful books in my head.
@DDD, I look forward to your WAYR of HTW. I’ll keep from posting any more thoughts about it until your post. You really are a recommender par excellence!
Susan Grant’s Star Champion is free.
I’ve been reading The Tyrant Alpha’s etc etc all afternoon and evening and I don’t love it. I like the heroine, but without being spoilery, she gets screwed over constantly in the book and the hero is the catalyst for a lot of it. I’m sure his big grovel is coming, but meh.
I loved TTARM, but *Spoiler*, the hero is an alpha hole. The tweaks done to show his point of view are good and the heroine definitely doesn’t let him walk all over her, but if you hate alpha holes there will be a scene where you will want to throw your device against a wall. Don’t do it; devices are expensive and the grovel/point of view change is good.
@wingednike: My first impression from the description was that this looked like a major alpha hole, then I was almost swayed to give it a chance by the raving comments… thank you for the confirmation, this is a no for me. There are too many alpha holes in real life these days – the last thing I need is them populating my escapist literature as well, especially disguised as “heroes”.
I loved Longbourn. I read it twice. I’m definitely in the A camp.