Getting Scrooged by Eden Bradley - Getting Scrooged is a super-steamy Christmas novella about an over-worked corporate mogul with something to prove, who never takes time out for herself. She finally finds her match in the man who is sent to negotiate a corporate merger between one of her companies, a small publishing house, and the larger one that is his employer. Holly and Ben were decent characters, but I felt like they were a little too much alike. Both had crappy lives growing up and both have driven, type-A personalities, but each for their own reasons. Holly’s dad always wished she was a boy to whom he could pass on his company, so she never quite felt like she measured up to his standards. Even though he passed away, she still feels like she has to prove to herself that she can be the kind of businessperson her father could have been proud of. As such, she drives herself into the ground, never taking time out except to occasionally have anonymous, no-strings sex with strangers she meets in bars. She turns forty on Christmas Eve and feels like life has passed her by and perhaps she’s missing out on something by not having a relationship. Ben, on the other hand, seems to have a pretty good handle on having fun and is driven more by the thrill of the hunt, so to speak. However, much like Holly, he isn’t excited about the upcoming holiday season. I guess I prefer for the hero and heroine to be more different – not polar opposites, but different enough that I feel like they’re going to genuinely enrich each other’s lives – and I didn’t necessarily sense that with Holly and Ben. Also, their personalities were just a little too far removed from my own for me to be able to fully relate to them.

Where the author seems to excel is in her love scenes that, overall, are smokin’ hot. Holly and Ben alone are steamy enough, but add in Ben’s two friends and sometimes lovers, Kit and Justin, and their love scenes could start a four-alarm fire.;-) The menage is only a temporary one, though, to fulfill one of the wishes on Holly’s bucket list, when I usually prefer them to be more permanent. However, I did enjoy that all three men are Brits, because it’s somewhat rare to find foreigners in American-set contemporary romances.

As much as I enjoyed the hot sex scenes, though, I’m not usually one to allow my brain to turn to mush because of them. Even making allowances for the characterizations, which were admittedly pretty decent for a novella, there were still a few little things that kept it from being a five-star read for me. First, I thought the author could have done a better job with blocking during dialogue. Sometimes the conversation runs on for a while with little or no character actions in between lines. The love scenes, while hot, were just a tad too chatty for my taste as well. Lastly, the whole story takes place over about four weeks time, during which there are big jumps forward in the story and a nearly two-week span where Holly and Ben are apart, so having them fall in love and marry so quickly perhaps wasn’t quite as believable as it could have been. However, I’ll allow that a little Dickensian magic on the side made it a bit easier to swallow. So overall, despite a few minor issues, Getting Scrooged was still a pretty enjoyable read. It was my first story by Eden Bradley, but certainly good enough to make me curious what she can do with a longer story format.

Note: This book contains explicit language and sexual situations, including spicy M/F and M/M interactions, as well as a M/F/M/M menage, use of sex toys and anal play, which some readers may find offensive. Star Rating: 4

Not So Tiny Tim by Robin L. Rotham – Before picking up the A Kinky Christmas Carol anthology, I hadn’t really heard of Robin L. Rotham, so I had no idea what to expect from her writing. I’m very pleased to say that I ended up loving Not So Tiny Tim. It was a hot, fun, quick read that was equal parts sweet and super sexy. The love scenes are so scorching, I thought my eReader might go up in flames.;-) But at the same time, they, and the story in general, expressed an emotional connection that’s not always easy to find in erotic romance. Not to mention, unlike the first novella in the series, the menage in this one is a permanent one, which was more to my liking. So, ultimately, I thoroughly enjoyed the few hours I spent reading this novella.

Tim, the subject of the title (I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination as to why he’s called that ;-)), is the nephew of Holly, the heroine of the first novella in the series, Getting Scrooged. He’s a successful video game developer, who as part of the Knight clan, is familiar with the trappings of wealth. However, he hasn’t really been living life. He keeps everyone he knows in carefully organized compartments: family, friend, or f*ck-buddy, and the last two never, ever overlap. Therefore, despite being in love with them both, he keeps his long-time best friend, Miranda, and his college buddy and current roommate, Peter, solidly relegated to the friend-zone. That all changes when a little magic brings Miranda and Pete together, making Tim long to join in. When we discover his reasons for keeping them at arm’s length all this time, it’s a very emotional moment that made me a little teary-eyed.

Miranda is a sweetheart, a scientist who’s been friends with Tim since they were teenagers and has loved him from afar for thirteen years. It was totally adorable that she’d saved herself for him all that time, while hoping against hope that someday he would see her as more than just a friend. But having heard about Tim’s size and kinkiness, she’s also adventurous enough to have prepared herself for those things and is eager to take everything that both Tim and Peter can dish out. Miranda is a very loving heroine who’s accepting of both men and doesn’t hesitate to engage in all sorts of sex play with them. She also knows almost instantly that she wants a future with them both when the opportunity presents itself.

Ever since a close intimate encounter in college, Peter has been attracted to his friend, but he knows Tim’s rule about not mixing friends and sex. He just doesn’t know why. Peter has spent the last several months living with Tim while the new house he designed for himself is being built, which has only deepened his feelings for Tim. Like Tim, Pete is bisexual, so when he finds the pretty Miranda at a bar, pining for Tim and reluctant to go to his Christmas celebration after having thrown herself at him with disastrous results, Pete offers to accompany her. Both of them hope it might make Tim jealous enough to do something about it. Pete is a Dom who isn’t totally overbearing, so I could appreciate how he gently pushes both Miranda and Tim outside their comfort zones and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Although he only marginally knew Miranda before meeting her in the bar, he’s totally into her from that very second, so there was never a doubt in my mind that he deeply cared about her too.

While their personalities don’t necessarily reflect classic geekiness, all three characters respective professions certainly suggest that they are, and I must say, these are three of the sexiest geeks I’ve ever read about.;-) I loved how both Miranda and Pete were long-time friends with Tim. It made the connection deeper and much more believable, because of their shared history. Since the story only takes place over a coupe of day’s time, Pete and Miranda’s feelings for each other develop very quickly, but I could definitely feel a connection there too. Tim’s long-held stubbornness about not becoming intimate with friends is pretty quickly overcome as well, so there were admittedly things in the story that easily might not have worked for me. However, the doorman, Frost, a common character in this series, who looks suspiciously like Santa Claus and has magical powers, brought a heartwarming flavor to the story and helped to make the short time span not as much of an issue. In the end, it seems that they were all fated to get together. Whatever it was about this novella, it undeniably hit a sweet spot for me, because I ended up loving it. This may have been my first read by Ms. Rotham, but I’ll definitely be taking a look at more of her work in the future.

Note: This book contains explicit language and sexual situations, including spicy M/F and M/M interactions, as well as a M/F/M menage, talk of sex toys, a little bondage, mild dominant behavior, and anal sex, which some readers may find offensive. Star Rating: 5

Marley In Chains by R.G. Alexander - Marley In Chains is the final novella in the A Kinky Christmas Carol series. This holiday-themed trilogy was written by three different authors, but the stories are connected by each being about a different member of the wealthy Knight family who all live in the same building, Dickens Towers, in Chicago. As with the other two novellas, the magical doorman, Frost, who looks suspiciously like Santa Claus plays a role as well, giving it a touch of whimsy. Overall, this was a pretty good wrap-up to the series with a few caveats which I’ll get to shortly.

The heroine of this novella is Marley, cousin and super-assistant to Holly from the first story, Getting Scrooged. She was born into wealth, but her mother lost two husbands (for some reason I can’t recall now whether it was to death or divorce) and remarried a man who was not of her social station. This left Marley suddenly adrift in a public school, when she’d been used to private school, and being teased by the other students. In stepped best friends, Michael and Carlos, who became her defenders. The three were inseparable for the next six years until Marley turned eighteen. They had shared some sexual intimacies and were close to making love when Marley lost her parents to a car accident just before Christmas and later left town. She was gone for several years, but returned to become her cousin’s assistant four years earlier. However, she never contacted the men she’d been in love with and had never forgotten, so she doesn’t reconnect with them until Michael comes looking for her and asking for her help to bring Carlos back to the land of the living. I mostly understood Marley and the issues that sent her running seventeen years ago, but it takes a while for those issues to fully surface. Once they did, I didn’t feel like they were really given the weight they deserved and were overcome a little too quickly. However, I did still like Marley and thought she was a pretty good heroine.

Marley’s heroes, Michael and Carlos, were devastated when she left town. Michael went on to become a champion boxer and now owns his own gym where he trains fighters and tries to keep at-risk youth out of trouble. Michael has always had strong family ties to fall back on, but Carlos didn’t. After Marley ran, Michael watched Carlos pull further and further away until he finally enlisted in the military and left town, too. At the end of his second tour, Carlos was badly injured by an IED blast, nearly losing his leg, but since returning he’s still been distant. Because of a letter Carlos wrote to Michael about Marley (unfortunately the reader is never let in on the details of its contents), Michael thinks the only thing that will revive Carlos is being reunited with the woman they both never stopped loving. This is what sends him to Marley’s doorstep, and he’s right about it being the only medicine Carlos really needed.

I liked Michael, but he’s maybe a little too rough around the edges for my taste. Over the years, he’d watched Carlos connect with Marley on a more tender and intellectual level that he doesn’t share with her, so when he sees that the same connection between the other two still burns brightly, he’s ready to bow out of the threesome gracefully. I generally understood where he was coming from and thought it was an interesting move on his part, but I would have liked to have felt a little more of what he was feeling that drove him to that decision. Others may disagree with me, but I thought that Carlos was the more intriguing of the two male characters, probably because as a writer, he seemed to have a softer, more poetic and intellectual side. I wish the author had dug a little deeper with his characterization, because I feel like he had a lot of layers that were only cursorily explored, if at all. I understood that he’d been hurt by Marley leaving, but his giving up a Harvard scholarship to drive a cab and work menial jobs, later entering the Marines, seemed at odds with the rest of the man being portrayed, who had typically been the beta to Michael's alpha. All that suddenly changes, though, when he surprises both Michael and Marley by taking the reins in their relationship after they reconnect. I also thought that his seeming depression after returning injured was told much more so than shown and was magically overcome simply by seeing Marley again. So while I liked both men, I thought they were similarly underdeveloped as Marley.

I think to some extent the underdevelopment of the characterizations played into the three characters’ relationship as a whole. We learn only enough to see that they had meant a lot to one another years ago and still do. I couldn’t help feeling that they have this rich backstory that’s barely explored. There’s a decent amount of steam fairly early in the story, but at first there isn’t much of an emotional connection given how close they’d all been before. It takes until the end of the story when they finally all come together to make love for this to right itself. Until then their interactions felt lusty but not particularly romantic or emotional. I also wasn’t fond of the author telling about certain events in hindsight, when, IMHO, they would have had a greater impact if shown in the moment. Otherwise, though, it was a good story. Despite my feeling it was lacking in some areas, it was still pretty enjoyable. I might be making some allowances for it being a novella, whereas if these types of issues had persisted in a full-length novel, I might not have been as forgiving. But there was just enough to keep me reading and generally satisfied with the outcome, so I couldn’t really justify marking it down any further. Marley In Chains was my first read by R. G. Alexander, but it has left me open to perhaps trying something else by her in the future.

Note: This book contains explicit language and sexual situations, including a spicy M/F/M menage, a touch of M/M action, use of sex toys, creative use of a cane, one scene of bondage with chains, a little spanking, exhibitionism, and anal sex, which some readers may find offensive. Star Rating: 4 ( )