Friday, November 11, 2011

Reveal Me (Unveiled 1) by Cari Quinn

Summary:
Alana MacGregor craves excitement, but when her sometimes lover dumps her at a popular sex club, she wonders if she’s outgrown her live-fast-and-recover-later lifestyle. The last thing she expects is to run into the nerdy guy she rebuffed in high school—or for him to rock her world in ways no other man ever has.

Hot on the trail of a story, Carter Nicholas can’t believe his luck at encountering the one woman he’s never forgotten. He’s come a long way from being a wall-hugging geek. Now he gets all A’s between the sheets. But can he convince Alana he’s her sure ticket to an unforgettable night—and maybe much more?

Reviewer: avidscribe
It’s one more lousy decision. First, Alana moved away from her hometown in Maryland to chase after a musician she was crazy about. Before the ink was even dry on their lease in Virginia, he’d bolted, leaving her stranded in a town she knew no one in. She manages to get a job for a newspaper there using her considerable skills in photography only to find they are using her for jobs like photographing sex toys for a series on the newest innovations in pleasure rather than giving her the more meaty assignments she craves.

Now she’s back home on vacation to see her good friend Kelly and Ramon, a man she met on one of her many visits home and is having a long distance relationship with now. Kelly drags her to the hottest sex club in town only to abandon her there and Ramon picks the dance floor as the perfect spot to reveal he’s seeing someone else as he proceeds to publicly dump her. Could things get worse? Sure. Her car is sitting in the parking lot there with a dead engine and flat tire.

Time for a drink. Or three.

Looking at the world through the bottom of an empty glass, she’s frustrated about everything in her life right now, including the fact that she’s horny and came to the club to get laid. Enter an old high school friend. It’s the Ugly Duckling tale—last time she saw him, he was an embarrassing geek. The man before her now is brawny and suave and her libido goes into overdrive. She wants him. Doesn’t matter she’s not quite sure who he is, he’s available and, judging by the hardness she feels as her fingers brush his zipper, he is willing. With little introduction and no subtlety, she dives in for a kiss, decides she likes what she tasted and they proceed to leave the club and fuck in the grass out back ... only it’s not just fucking and she senses she’s latched on to one of the good guys worth keeping.

It’s a short story with time acceleration because nowhere would two people come together so quickly in today’s age without at least knocking back some of the preliminaries like, oh, names maybe?! He knows who she is, at least; she's the girl who got away, the girl of his dreams, the one girl who has been his lust object since high school. He can’t believe his luck that of all the gin joints in all the world, in all the towns, she should walk into his kind of thing. He knows what he wants, he just has to convince her too.

Alana is not going to make it easy. She is edgy, confrontative, combative and distrusting. She’s also done him wrong long ago and needs to apologize. Sex will pave the way.

It’s an Ellora Cave Quickie and, at 58 pages, the characters are not very developed and the accelerated storyline unbelievable. For what it is, it works fine. However, I’d say this is the same kind storyline I’ve read on 40 other shorts this year alone; just substitute BDSM or werewolf or runaway abused woman for a variation on theme to repackage it. There is nothing that stands out and makes me specifically want to read more of this writer’s works. The dialog is not snappy, Alana is mildly unlikable, the sex is same-old, the setting just short of seamy. The fact that she is a photographer and he a writer might have made for an interesting storyline but their professions are used as merely background filler and I found that disappointing. However, the brevity of the story cannot allow for real judgment of her total work. Two stars.

Review Courtesy Of: ManicReaders

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