CBR16 Bingo: Smash
These books smash genres (intergalactic alien dating via a cooking reality show) and the characters, ahem, “smash.”
If it’s not obvious, I chose these books for their over-the-top titles. Plus, a blue muscled alien in a cooking apron was too wild to pass up.
Alien Love Game: The Tasty Bake (Mated to the Bolan #2)
By Kyra Keys
After her best friend is selected for the reality TV show, “The Alien Love Games,” Cherise decides that maybe she can snag a sexy Bolan of her own. Cherise doesn’t know how she’s going to get on the show, but using her famous singer sister, Lyra, as an incentive to cast her is just what she needs to get on the show.
In this TV show, the bachelorette gets to choose the nature of the competition. So Cherise decides that she will marry the winner of a baking competition. The producers have already selected the Bolan candidates. Lucky for him, Brix is a famous chef on his homeworld. He signed up for the show because he does want to find a mate and is too busy to date. Brix isn’t sure how a relationship will work with a human woman, but he trusts that the show’s producers know what they are doing.
It turns out that neither he nor Cherise have anything to worry about as they discover through their instant and overpowering attraction that they are fated mates. The rest of this short book completely skips over any of the competition or baking aspects of the story and goes straight to the mating part.
And I’m fine with it. No one names a book “Mated to the XYZ” without spending a good portion of the content on that topic.
CW for mild-to-medium BDSM. This is a silly, fun novella and is book two in the five book series “Mated to the Bolan Complete Series: 5 Alien Fated Mates Stories.”
Double Dirty Mountain Men
by Parker Grey
This title kills me. I love it. I’m here for it.
Rose is a nineteen-year-old waitress who is just trying to get by. After being stranded in a snowstorm after her worthless father’s run-down pickup truck breaks down, she is rescued by two rangers. Knox and Logan are coworkers who live in an isolated cabin and do…something. It’s never really clear what their job is except to rescue animals injured in traps and take them to the nearby wildlife vet.
Lucky for her, Rose is uninjured and makes a full recovery after warming up at the guys’ cabin. Once she is lucid, she begins to have feelings, such as extreme lust, for her rescuers. Knox and Logan are not together, but they have shared girlfriends before.
Anyway….
Aside from a tiny bit of mild jealousy between the two men, they all find a way to stay warm during the snowstorm and while they are waiting for the roads to clear.
This story is silly and smutty. Rose is petite and perfect and an innocent fantasy woman (of course she’s a virgin!) who needs to be protected and cherished and who likes big burly sensitive men who chop wood and have fireplaces and bearskin rugs. The smut is fun though. This was a silly, fun read, which is exactly what I signed up for.
I received both of these books through a Stuff your Kindle Day from Romance Bookworms.
For this year’s CBR16 Book Bingo Reading Challenge I’m choosing albums from the 1970s that helped raise me. When I think of Smash, I think of Crazy on You and Magic Man from Heart’s debut album Dreamboat Annie (1975).
