Review: In His Bed by AJ Hardcourt
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2011
***REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS***This book is listed as thirty-six pages, but really it's thirty pages with a few nice little excerpts from other books added at the end. Thirty pages. In a regular length novel, that could perhaps be the opening scene, a single chapter or the epilogue of the story. In this short novella, thirty pages encompasses the beginning, middle and the end and those thirty pages are nothing short of brilliant.Jude Park is going home. He's going home on a hope and a prayer, as they say, and at the risk of rejection. He has no job or place of his own to live, he's 24 years-old, with a postgraduate degree in accounting and he's in love with his Mom's best friend. Rob Aspen is a paramedic, he's ten years older than Jude and the best friend of Jude's mother, Karen.When Jude arrives at Salt Lake City Airport, he's exhausted, his plane is two hours late and he's looking for his mom to pick him up. Instead, he gets Rob. His mom, Karen, has been sent on a business trip to Phoenix for the next week, so Rob's there to greet him and take him back to her house. Once they arrive at Karen's house it's clear that both men will be spending the night, since it's late and there are enough bedrooms for two of them there. Jude has it planned out, he's going to use manipulation to get what he wants, but when things get intimate between the two men, manipulating Rob is the last thing Jude wants to do. This isn't a mindless romp between the sheets with a complete stranger, it's Rob, the man he has been in love with for the last eight years and if he wants a chance at a real relationship with him, he's going to have to fess up about what or whom rather, really brought him home to Salt Lake.I've never read an A.J. Hardcourt book before this one, although after reading a favorable review a friend of mine gave another book a few months ago, I did pick one up. Its been sitting in my ereader ever since, unread and forgotten, as so sadly happens with numerous books kept there, but I will be the first one to admit that I was remiss in not reading a story by this author earlier. If the rest of A.J.'s work is anything like this one, I'm going to become a life-long fan in no time!