Hot Damn

CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

Title: Hot Damn
Author: Katherine Lace
Publication date: 01/09/2017
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Kindle Unlimited: Yes
Cliffhanger: No
Rating: 2 out of 5

Blurb (from Amazon.com):
Maddy is a hot single momma with attitude. She's only interested in a fake relationship, but I want her forever.

I met Maddy when I pulled her out of a burning building. One minute I'm doing my job, the next there's a naked woman in my arms. Look, I'm a professional. I don't cross lines, but she's giving me every reason to. She's gorgeous and single.

Jackpot.

Except she wants nothing to do with me. All she wants is a fake boyfriend for a few weeks. Someone who'll go on dates with her, dote on her toddler, and treat her like the hottie she is.

She's crazy if she thinks I'm pretending. I spend more time fantasizing about her curvy body than doing my damn job. I'm not going anywhere without her.

She's mine-the only flame I will never extinguish.

My review
So, there were some things I liked about this one, and some stuff that just irked the crap out of me. I’ll start with the positives:

• I liked that the hero wasn’t terrified of Maddy’s child. He also wasn’t a commitment-phobe, which was awesome.
• The kid was cute, and he was a realistic depiction of a toddler, not the precocious kid-that-says-things-no-kid-that-age-would-ever-say-in-real-life that you find in some novels. Nothing irritates me more than an author who writes a 3-year-old character and has that character giving sage relationship advice to the hero or heroine. (And before you ask: yes, I’ve seen this. I won’t call anyone out, but it happens. Trust me.) Kids should never be used as convenient plot devices, and this one wasn’t, so I appreciated it.
• Mechanically speaking, this was a well-written novel.

And now, the stuff that made me want to DNF at a few points:

• The building is on fire (albeit a small fire that wasn’t terribly dangerous). Jesse is doing his job by getting Maddy out of the building. It’s not his fault that her music was on and she was in the shower (and her smoke detectors weren’t working). It wasn’t his fault that he saw her naked. It wasn’t his fault that she was being a belligerent bitch by refusing to leave the burning building and yelling at him that he should leave. So, yeah, he knocked her door down and carried her out of there caveman style. I saw no other way for him to do his job. Is Maddy at all grateful at any point that he carried her out of a burning building? Nope. She continued bitching at him and demanded that he fix her door. How about you fix your smoke detectors, Maddy?
• I don’t even like cats (I’m 100% a dog person) and I didn’t care for the way Jesse treated his late sister’s cat, Thor. If I left my beloved pets to a family member who treated them like crap, I’d haunt his ass. Nothing short of Dean Winchester would be able to send my angry spirit to the other side.
• Maddy suffered (almost terminally) from what I call Bella Swan syndrome. She might as well have tattooed, “Oh, I’m so ugly and plain and nerdy that no hot guy would ever want me” on her chest. But of course, every guy who sees her thinks she’s the most beautiful creature in the world. The number of times Maddy told Jesse that he must be “joking” and faking sexual interest in her was staggering (and annoying). Maddy, sweetheart, here’s a little tip for you: men can’t fake erections.
• The first two sex scenes were fairly close together in the book, and read like they were copied and pasted. The same spanking scene, the same position, the same moans and groans. They were well-written sex scenes, but super repetitive.
• Maddy’s parents were soooooo one-dimensional. No nuance to them at all. They were stereotypical rich, white people with values straight out of the 1950s. And if I was Maddy, I’d die before I let my kid be exposed to either of them.
• Now, my husband loves me. I have no doubt about this. But he’d never put on tights for me and attend a lame comic book cos play party. Nope. Never. I’m calling bullshit on that one.
• The whole “bad guy” suspense thing at the end felt like a total throw-away. Almost like it was unplanned and the author hit a certain word count and said, “well, I need to do something to wrap this thing up. Maybe I’ll throw in a villain and a little danger.” It all felt pointless.   

All in all, it’s not the worst I’ve ever read, but it’s far from the best.  

Does this book contribute to or help crush the romance stigma?
I think this one contributes to the romance stigma. It doesn’t contribute mightily to it, but it contributes in the way that it’s super predictable, a little unrealistic, and pretty fluffy.    

Other reading suggestions
For sexy (but not at all smutty), funny stories about hot firemen, try Jill Shalvis’s Firefighters series. For a great, angsty, sexy new adult romance about a fake relationship that soon turns all too real, try Monica Murphy’s The One Week Girlfriend. ​

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