3 Smooches

Synopsis

Leah Godfrey has almost everything she could ask for—
She’s got an interior design business with an A-list clientele, a weekly spot on a national morning TV show, and a great daughter—but she doesn’t have a date for her twentieth high school reunion. It wouldn’t be a big deal, but her ex-husband was her high school sweetheart, and now he’s married to the slut Leah caught him with in bed. She won’t let the biggest failure of her life overshadow her success.

When her best friend suggests she hire a date, Leah thinks the idea is scandalous. But for one weekend, she wants to forget her mistakes and pretend she has everything her ex took away from her.
Jagger Holiday makes women’s fantasies come true—
But working as a male escort leaves him feeling empty. He turns to photography to fill the void. When Jagger gets a call from a lonely single mom who needs the same thing he does, he wants more. He wants her.

Leah and Jagger have no problem convincing everyone at the reunion they’re together. She should’ve known better than to think there’d be no strings attached.

After all, he’s a professional.

Review

No Strings Attached is the first book in Kristen Strassel’s new series, The Escort. I must admit, I was a bit nervous going in to this one, but I liked the idea even if the notion of him being an escort – and the infidelity that implies – made me uneasy. The first third of the book pleasantly surprised me, so I settled in and soldiered on.

“It was time for me to start loving me.”

Leah Godfrey is a thirty-eight-year-old single mom of a seventeen-year-old daughter, Raven. Divorced from her high school sweetheart after she caught him in their bed with her arch nemesis from high school, she’s a woman on a mission to re-invent herself, to start fresh, and the best way she thinks she can do that is by starting to care for herself. An interior designer to A-list clientele and a morning TV personality, Leah is well accustomed to creating beauty for others, but she’s lost as to how to turn that magic on herself.

“I was getting too old for this shit.”

Jagger Holiday. Gorgeous. Sex god. Escort. But there is more to this man, a side that he allows very few to see, and certainly not his clients. But then along came Leah, and she turned out to be somewhat of a game changer for him. He has his reasons for being an escort, and while it is definitely making him tons of cash, it’s not his passion, it’s not his calling and it’s not something he really even wants to do any longer. It is, however, something he feels that he has to do in order to earn the seed money for his dream.

“For the first time in a long time, I needed something more. Something I could call my own and be proud of.”

Leah needs a date for her high school reunion. No way can she go back there without one. Her best friend treats her to a date with an escort. Leah chooses Jagger, and their first date is scheduled. The attraction they feel is for each other is very real, and for the first time ever, Jagger finds himself crossing all kinds of boundaries with a client. For Leah, Jagger brings out a side of her that she didn’t know even existed, and when she steps out of her comfort zone with him, she finds that she really likes it.

“I think this describes us perfectly. Sweet, messy, and totally inappropriate.”

They head up to the reunion, and just as Leah expected, the run-in with her ex-husband is awful. He’s cruel, he’s mean and he takes great pleasure in humiliating her in front of everyone. The home-wrecking new wife, Leah’s nemesis from high school, and her posse of evil bitches, are right there along for the ride. Leah runs off from this confrontation without a word and completely devastated by his hurtful comments. Jagger swoops in whisking Leah back to the room for a seriously sexy photo shoot that leaves him weak in the knees.

“She was a work of art, and she took my fucking breath away.”

The weekend comes to an end, and knowing that a relationship with him won’t work when he’s based in Miami and she’s in DC not to mention the whole escort thing, Leah ends it. They both leave broken hearted. But it’s not long before she gives in and calls him. They plan another meet up for after the holidays because Jagger is booked through the escort agency through Christmas. But, unbeknownst to them, someone truly nasty has figured out their secret. While home for Christmas, Leah’s ex husband insists she and her family, including their daughter, come a holiday party at to his house – their former home together – to see his mom. The real purpose for his invitation is made evident when the new wife’s best friend shows up shortly after Leah arrives with none other than Jagger in tow.

“No, we weren’t perfect. But we were honest and real…”

I liked the premise of this book, but I think I was expecting it to go in a different direction. It’s my first venture into a plot featuring a male escort. Through the first third of the book, I was enjoying their banter, their attraction and how sexy they were together. The storyline advancement was a bit slow, and the author seemed to focus a bit more on describing the minute details around the couple than she did the couple themselves, their budding relationship or the storyline itself. These two were surrounded by a whole lot of drama but, unfortunately, that portion of the plot didn’t get nearly enough attention, development or resolution for this story to have worked for me. I know all about Leah and her best friend, Kari’s, love of sangria, but the humiliating confrontation at the reunion with her ex barely garnered a few paragraphs. It was the same with the awful scene at the ex’s Christmas party, where she was deliberately set up by him, his wife and her friends for the sole purpose of humiliating her in front of her family, most of the town and their daughter. But nothing came of it. She blurted out a semi-dramatic one-line response, turned on her heel and left. Huh? I wanted more of a confrontation with her ass of an ex; instead Leah came off as a totally weak, cowering doormat.

What bothered me most, however, was that I was fully unprepared for the very, very sketchy, barely there happy-for-now ending. And by happy for now, I mean right now, as in that very moment, because who knows where they’ll be the next day, let alone two hours from then. After the party scene, the story continued to drag on, but then very abruptly and suddenly ended on that HFN note. Now, my kindle told me I was coming to the end, but there was ample time to tie it up with a slightly more fleshed out ending. I was taken totally by surprise that the story ended, and I was left holding my Kindle thinking “wait a minute, what just happened here?” To say I was disappointed in the ending is putting it mildly.

For a story to work for me, I greatly prefer a HEA, but I’ll take a fleshed-out HFN. I can handle a HFN when it is more developed and defined. This HFN, though… well I was left mostly assuming they were going to move forward in pursuit of a relationship. That just doesn’t work for me personally. Couple that with the way that Leah just took all that verbal abuse from her ex with little to no response, while she was the one wronged by him and claims to be re-inventing herself as a strong, confident, successful woman? I just didn’t believe it, I didn’t believe, or really like, Leah, and it just didn’t wring true. Sadly, No Strings Attached just didn’t work for me.

The writing was good, it was well proofed and edited, and the author was very descriptive in the background details. If she’d have given that same attention to the storyline and the character development, I’d probably have a very different opinion of this book. But for me, this was a so-so read that ultimately left me a bit frustrated and disappointed. Not an epic fail or a DNF, just not quite sated or happy. 3 Smooches from me.

~ Danielle Palumbo

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