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The last post in the series came with a confession (that I read the book in less than 24 hours).  This one starts with a warning: I read this one in a day, as in between two sleeps. I also did laundry and took my children to the library, but I’m not sure I did much else AND IT WAS GLORIOUS.  

Now for the confession:  we have a problem around here.  When we read romance novels, we get sucked in and we don’t like to do anything else until we see how the HEA is going to happen.  I know it’s weird because we KNOW the book ends in HEA, but the HOW is the part that keeps me glued to the book until I have discovered all of its secrets!  So, now that we have learned reading romance novels on work nights means we stay up too late, we try to focus on romance novels on the weekends, especially these, because we had some pretty high expectations and y’all, so far, THEY HAVE DELIVERED!  

Now for the book – The Mogul and the Muscle is book two in our billionaire, open door, romantic comedy series wherein last week we focused on Emily and Derek and met Emily’s friends, Cameron, Luna, and Daisy.  This week, we’ll be hanging out with Cameron. Cam is an engineer turned CEO who was the victim of involved in an attempted mugging.  Her friends are very concerned about her safety, so Emily asks Derek for someone to look after Cam, so Jude (yup, we met him last week at the boxing gym) takes the job.  He’s struggling to adjust to life after the CIA and keeps getting private security referrals despite his desire to retire. He’ll take this (other) one last job because his pal Derek asked him to, and because he likes Emily.  Cam is, we’ll call it displeased, but not enough for me to feel comfortable calling this enemies-to-lovers. [Ashley says it’s an over-protective Alpha-male with a strong and sassy heroine trope.] We get to know our two leads as well as a few others at Cam’s company and additional residents of Bluewater (Cam’s chef, personal trainer, and gardner) and they are all just adorable, well mostly at least!  There’s even an 80s themed party at Bluewater! During the course of the book, as expected, drama happens a few times and Cam and Jude use their very different skill sets to tackle it. The bonus epilogue, oh y’all, it was very different from last week’s, but I loved it so much! It just fit Cam and Jude so well even if I was wondering about half the time if Jude set it up or if he really just shouldn’t have gone back there and it was going to be an actual problem.  

I’m SO looking forward to next week’s book, Wild Open Hearts by Kathryn Nolan where we’ll be focusing on Luna.  Nolan is the only brand-new-to-me author of this set and I am super excited to meet her on Saturday morning.  I’m not sure I’ll get the whole book in as quickly as the first two because spending most of the day on the couch isn’t going to be an option this time, but I’m guessing that’ll be the only reason.  

Oh, and just in case there is any question, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and am trying to figure out (even more than before, because it’s been a thing for a while), how I can live in a community my friends and I develop and hand select residents to share it with us.  I don’t need the drama of a romance novel, but some of the fun pieces are definitely worth pondering how to move closer to in real life. Just not necessarily one shaped like the female reproductive system, although, if it happens accidentally, I’ll take it.

~Nikki

True story, dear readers, usually Nikki writes her part of the post first [Nikki: because she can’t recall the plot and characters correctly if she doesn’t get it out quickly – perhaps one day Ashley will share some of my more egregious errors she’s corrected] and I fill in with my opinion after I have read her delightful words. But, this time, I avoided reading her overview and wrote my own, and this is how it began:

Let’s all get one thing straight, we read romance novels because we know exactly how they are going to end. It’s the characters, antics, story from beginning to end, in addition to quality and, yes, quantity of schmexytimes that keeps us reading them. We, as in humanity, love learning about what other people, fictional or not, do in their quest for love. Or, avoidance of love and denial of physical chemistry on the part of one or both parties… y’all should know the tropey drill by now. 😀

And THEN, she goes into this pretty fabulous and I can’t really do anything to ameliorate summary of the necessary plot points. But, I wrote this:

In  The Mogul and the Muscle, Claire Kingsley gives us Cameron Whitbury, aerospace engineer and CEO of Spencer Aeronautics, the second of the ‘vagillionaires.’ Yeah, that’s right, it’s the name these four badass lady billionaires gave themselves. Instead of meeting her first, though, we meet Jude Ellis, retired CIA operative who swears he doesn’t have a sign on his door that says “Personal Security and Problem Solver,” but he keeps agreeing to help those people who come to him with issues regular law enforcement can’t seem to handle. We also see him spectacularly fail at a first date with ‘normal seeming’ Karen, who he met on a dating app for ‘the over-thirty crowd,’ in chapter one.

Our couple’s meet cute is at Cameron’s office, where she doesn’t know her personal assistant, three best friends, and Derek Price (yes, our hero from The Price of Scandal) have conspired against her to have a meeting with Jude to hire him as her personal bodyguard since she was the recent victim of an attempted mugging in her office parking garage. Cameron, up until this point, was the only one of the four Bluewater Billionaires who did not already have personal security. Emily has Jane, Daisy speaks of Alessandro during their ‘personal security intervention’ conversation in chapter 2, where at the same time Luna admits it’s comforting to know someone has your back.

And now for my conclusion:

Maybe it’s my deep-seated need for red-headed solidarity, the fact that I am jealous that Cameron has both a personal trainer and a personal chef that live in one of her four guest houses, or the fact that she tries to break Jude’s professional stoicism by taking him lingerie shopping in Agent Provacateur, Cameron is my girl-crush aspiration. I also adore how Cameron and Jude have the usual rom-com blunders of life, but they are blunders that any human being could find themselves in, not just those with tons of money…ok, maybe you still have to have the B in front of -illions, but they ARE semi-believable situations.

Claire Kingsley writes contemporary romances with big-feels, sassy heroines, and swoony heroes. All of her books are available to read through Kindle Unlimited, or you can purchase them digitally from $2.99-$4.99. This was my first Claire title even though Nikki had been highly recommending that I read her Book Boyfriend trilogy for over a year. [The TBR is long and the days are short…] She and The Price of Scandal author Lucy Score have co-written the Bootleg Spring Series. If you want to know more about her, her titles, and for photographic proof of why she calls her husband Mr. Arm Porn to her readers, check out www.clairekingsleybooks.com.

~Ashley

It’s not just us who get/need to be/want to be absorbed in a book as The Bluewater Billionaires have done, as we had a friend of the blog share a title she’s absorbed in currently (and we are too – we’re buddy (re)reading it with a small group actually).  What are your go-to genres or titles when you need to be absorbed in a book? Are there a few?