Love, Lust and Books

Talking Dirty with the Boss by Jackie Ashenden

Series: Talking Dirty, Book 3

Format: eARC, 150 pages

Release Date: December 9, 2013

Source: Received from publisher for review.

Links:  Amazon | B&N | Kobo |Goodreads

What I Thought: 

This book is part of a series that I apparently overlooked because I didn’t do my homework before I snagged it up thanks to its sexy, but deceiving cover! It’s book three in the Talking Dirty series who’s character’s lives all intertwine with one another, so you get to meet each hero/heroine in a prior book.

TDwtB is about Marissa Clair, a would be artist and Luke McNamara, financial consultant and boss to Clair. While the blurb reads as though this will be a sexy and titillating read full of sass and witty dialogue, the only thing I got out of this, is that some people can be real pricks and deserve a good ol’ smacking. Marissa had no respect for Luke’s time, rules, space. I can go on and on. It aggravated me to hear her say he was an uptight asshole, yet she’s thinking about kissing him. What? No. When I meet an “uptight asshole”, the first thing I want is to put distance between us, not attack his mouth. As for Luke, I didn’t really find him to be uptight. Once you are in his head you understand why he does or acts the way he does. Still, I didn’t really warm up to him either. Just like Marissa, he kept going on about how she aggravated him, yet he wanted to know the damn color of her panties. And just the fact that he kept mentioning his OCD, as though I didn’t already know he had it annoyed the fuck out of me. He used it as a crutch, an excuse for some of his actions that didn’t even border on obsessive-compulsive just childishly irritating.

Once Luke and Clair have a scratch-your-itch encounter, the pregnancy that follows drives this story. Me? Just drove me crazy. Luke felt that because of his OCD it would be best for them to live together, and their plans to keep distance just goes to hell because regardless of who is irritated by whom, they still want each other naked and sweaty. Like I stated above, this story should have been full of sass and wit, but I am terribly disappointed in the outcome, but mostly the overall story. I never completely felt the connection between these two characters and I just kept hoping for a clue as to why Marissa was exactly what Luke needed when he couldn’t even stand her to begin with and vice-versa. It’s a short story, at only 150 pages, and understandably the author can’t exactly prolong their “love story”, but it would still have been nice to know that they had a reason for wanting each other and therefore falling in love, as opposed to the insta-love that dripped all over my Kindle. Ugh.