Some Kind of Sexy, by Jamie Sobrato

I've been feeling a bit under the weather lately (I was running a high fever yesterday, but I'm ok now, I just can't talk at all because my throat hurts), so if you don't mind, I'll keep my comments about Some Kind of Sexy (excerpt), by Jamie Sobrato pretty short and to the point.

Unlike her friends, party planner Juliet Emory will do almost anything to escape the fate of “I do.” There’s just too much fun to be had to tie herself to one man. Hottie Cole Matheson is case in point. Sure, he’s a little straight-laced for her taste, but his steamy kisses reveal a depth of passion beneath that good-guy exterior. A sexy fling is exactly what this party girl needs!

Cole doesn’t do casual flings…until he meets Juliet, that is. She is so tempting he can’t resist her. With the scorching heat between them, he agrees to a quick affair—or anything else!—to keep Juliet in his bed. But all too soon, his feelings are no longer casual. Can he hold out against her sensual tricks and convince her that the best kind of sexy comes after the commitment?

Mostly, this was quite nice. Problem is, there was something right there at the end that left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and that made the difference between the B- I was planning on and the C+ I'm rating it.

Keeping it short:

Positives:

- Cole really was a nice guy and I liked him. I loved how he fought to keep seeing Juliet even against her best intentions, just because he could see she was someone worth getting to know better. I'll even excuse his lame invented psychological theory, just because he was aware of its lameness himself, but just couldn't think of anything else.

- I liked that bad girl Juliet wasn't really a virgin in disguise, but a woman who'd been round the block a couple of times. However, there'll be more about this in the negatives, I'm afraid.

- Chemistry: oh, wow. That was lovely, and the ambience helped.

Negatives:

- Here's the more about Juliet's sex life: her whole rationalization about why she just had to remain free and unshackled from any man was silly. This wasn't something she'd decided on because it was the best way for her, it was more a kind of stupid imitation that made no sense.

- Even more: she was awfully self-consciously "bad", with those rules and the whole "League of Scandalous Women" nonsense.

- And the worst, which is what I mentioned left a bad taste: the whole resolution of the main conflict is based on Juliet discovering that her aunt hadn't been happy being single after all. Oh, no, she'd just projected that image, but behind it, she was bitter and sad. Ok, this is a romance novel, so of course the heroine is going to realize she actually wants to spend the rest of her life with the hero, but the message here was basically that a woman can't be happy alone and that if she doesn't find a man (any man, apparently), she deserves to be the object of pity. And this bothered me.

Without that final revelation about aunt Ophelia, I'd have been so much happier with this one!