Review: A great erotic romance with real, well developed characters!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 7, 2011
I was hooked the moment I read the premise of Hired. I mean the heroine gets to spend a week in a paradise island far from everything and her sole task is to keep an eye on a brooding hero and enjoy herself? That sounds like a fantasy to most of us. :-)Brooke's best friend who is an elite call girl asks for Brooke's help in spending a week in a beautiful remote island villa with brooding hockey player Logan Taylor for which she would receive 100,000 dollars to pay for her nursing studies. However Brooke is no call girl, she only agrees to the vacation when it is garanteed sex is not part of the bargain and so she sets off to fly away to a paradise island with white sandy beach and turquoise water.Hired was a great read. I loved how Lily Harlem did not jump head first into the sex scenes, but instead she strongly built the foundation of Brooke and Logan's relationship by developing their characters in detail. The very first love scene took place at 33% of the story! Until then we got a good feel of who Brooke and Logan were.I enjoyed how real Lily Harlem made Brooke: she is an ordinary girl with curves, who isn't ashamed of her body but accepts it as part of herself, and it was great to see Logan appreciate her womanly figure and be attracted to her natural body type.Logan is of course a wet dream come true: he is a professional athlete, so his droolworthy body is a given, as Brooke describes him shortly after meeting him:"He may act like a Neanderthal but he had the body of a god."I loved almost everything about this book: both characters were interesting and well developed, their interactions always kept me engaged be it a fight, a humourous banter, a sexy seduction or just ordinary chat. The writing was also fluent and kept things progressing naturally. My only complaint is that Brooke rather often had some internal syrupy gushing about how "they were destined to be together" which I felt too cheesy even with her eccentricities:"But regardless of the method of our meeting the heavens had brought our souls together.""Maybe, just maybe, Logan was the yang to my yin, my soul mate." This is said quite early in their relationship, about just after the first time they had sex."I was in love, there were no two ways about it. Without him at my side I felt empty."I'm all for the H/H falling in love and not just having meaningless sex for the sake of it (though that can be fun too ;-p), but here I felt it was premature for Brooke to already feel with such certainty that Logan was her "soulmate" after only having spent such a short time with him (about 2 days).With Lily Harlem gradually easing the story into sensuality and introducing the sex scenes well after having established the characters and their connection, I felt like this was more of an erotic romance than an erotica novel. Sure the sex scenes were hot, but I would say the emphasis was rather on Brooke and Logan's emotional and romantic relationship than their bedroom antics.  I enjoyed Hired a lot and will definitely check out Lily Harlem's other books!Heat Level: 3.5 out of 5Story Rating: 4 out of 5