Available at Amazon only
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Dazzled*
Parody of Subgenre Romance?
We meet Lacey, who curates a museum of a billionaire, as she is talking about her attraction to her boss with a friend. He comes from California old money and has quite a reputation as a playboy. She fantasizes about him but knows he wouldn’t be interested in an academic like her. Also, she wouldn’t want to be just another of his for-the-night-only women, as that seems to be about the duration of his relationships. We meet Sebastian as he is flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles. But he isn’t doing this on an airplane. Nope, he’s a dragon shifter. He’s just bought an old piece from his family’s history that had been stolen and is happily taking it back home. As he flies, he can’t seem to stop thinking about Lacey. He is definitely attracted to his curator.
This book has such over-the-top language used to describe the attraction between the couple and their appearance that the story almost seems to be a spoof, a send-up of not only the romance genre in general but of shifter romance, paranormal romance, billionaire romance, and boss romance. To me, it reads like a parody of all those genres, exploiting the language and tropes of those types of stories. I don’t know if this was intentional by the author or if this is just her writing style. Other than being overblown, the writing itself is relatively solid and easy to get into. She has a good sense of pacing, as climactic even happened when they should. She did need a few more nouns and verbs, though, to describe how a particular undergarment became moist, or perhaps she could have chosen not to use that image so much. Surprisingly, the intimate moments aren’t as often as one might imagine, although there are lots of heated gazes and imaginings before their attraction comes to full fruition.
