Review: Saucy, but a little light...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 19, 2013
Portia da Costa's "Tempted by Two" starts off very promisingly. Burnt-out executive Katie is visiting Little Marplethorpe (nice play on Miss Marple and Robert Mapplethorpe!). She stares at a painting of a sensual menage between two men and a woman, fantasizing how much she would love to be in the scene. Much to her surprise, the artist, bad boy Marcus, is standing right behind her, and very quickly he whisks her off to his private quarters and introduces her to his lover, Owen, and ... the playing starts.What worked for me in the piece was Portia's frisky language. Words like "post orgasmic collywobbles" and "foxy-smelling knickers" are actually endearing to me, although I can see some American readers being perplexed. The overall tone of the story was very literate without being pretentious. I liked Katie's insecurity at the beginning, because the men are gorgeous and she feels that she's just playing a role in their sexy games together. I liked this paragraph: "It was like a whirlwind had just deposited her in a twisted Oz, a world entirely new to her. One she didn't know her place in, despite the pleasure she'd just experienced. She looked from Marcus to Owen and back again. What was she to them, this woman they'd plucked purely at random from amongst visitors to their house?"But for me, Portia missed the chance to take the story a little deeper. An example of this is Marcus and Owen's previous "girlfriend," Lydia. She is the woman in the picture that Katie sees at the beginning, and during the narrative Katie actually attends her wedding (to a woman!) with Marcus and Owen. But the scene is completely absent from the story. It's as if a wedding, with the attendant jealousy and tension Katie might feel when she sees this woman, would make it just too real. And I never felt Marcus and Owen were real enough. They're constantly encouraging and flattering Katie, but no darkness or complexity is allowed to come through in any way that might disturb the fantasy of the story. Calling Owen "the blond man" was rather strange, too.I also noticed a number of typos (e.g., Dolce and Gabanna) and missing or extra words. It's the kind of thing a writer would miss in their own work, but a good proofreader would pick up. (The writing is otherwise so strong that the flaws stood out a bit for me.)Nonetheless, because the sex scenes were very hot, especially the one in the wood, I'm going to bump my rating up to four stars.(Received my copy from NetGalley in return for an honest review.)