Review: Hard Wood – Jenika Snow
Hard Woodby Jenika Snow
Series: Ash Brothers #1
Also in this series: Knock on Wood, Touch Wood
Publisher: Carina Press
Publication Date: March 19, 2018
Genres: Romance
Pages: 73
Source: NetGalley
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
My rating:
The Dirty Bits from Carina Press give you what you want, when you want it. Designed to be read in an hour or two, these sex-filled microromances are guaranteed to pack a punch and deliver a happily-ever-after.
A new supersexy insta-love novella from USA TODAY bestselling author Jenika Snow that has a gruff lumberjack yelling T-I-M-B-E-R for the woman he’s been waiting for.
The Ash Brothers—they know how to handle their wood.
I’m a hard man. A loner. Or so town gossip says. After having my heart sent through the chipper, I’ve kept to myself. I prefer the quiet of the woods to the ramblings of clingy women who think they can tame a wild mountain man.
Until Mia. Now she’s all I think about.
I should have stayed away. She’s too sweet for a brute like me, but I can’t stop wanting her, picturing her sated in my sheets.
Mia knows just what kind of wood I’m working with. She’s the soft to my hard, the sugar to my bitter bark.
And I love seeing her walk on the wild side.
This book is approximately 15,000 words
For those times when size does matter. The Dirty Bits from Carina Press: Quick and dirty, just the way we like it.
I’ve read a few of these novellas from the Dirty Bits line at Carina Press, and they’ve all lived up to their name – short, sweet and super steamy. While I’ve seen them classified more as erotica than romance, they do all have HEAs (or at least HFNs), and while there is character and plot development, it’s necessarily more compressed since these all fall under 100 pages. If you haven’t picked one of these up before, I’d highly recommend it!
Noah is the oldest of three brothers that own a lumber company (yes, this is the first in a trilogy, why do you ask?), and has lived most of his life in Rockbridge, a small lumber town in Colorado. At one point he tried to move to the city for a woman, but things didn’t work out, to put it mildly. Since then – ten years ago – he’s focused on work and avoided women completely. Mia is an accountant that grew up in a small town that slowly became suburbia, and has just moved to Rockbridge after a few years of big city life in Denver. While starting a new job and uprooting her whole life has been stressful, she finally feels at home. When Noah and Mia cross paths at the town diner, they don’t even say a single word to each other, but both feel a sudden and deep attraction to the other.
“And behind his eyes I could see the pain, but also the light that was just waiting to shine brighter again. It was a little on the crazy side, but my instincts told me this man was just like me, moving through life, waiting for…something more.”
While I’m normally not a fan of instalove – or, in this case, insta-lust – the brevity of the story makes it a necessity. I think Ms. Snow did a great job with both characters accepting that it was pretty much insane to feel so strongly for each other so soon, while also really selling the idea that what they felt was real and special.
The heat level on this is high, including one particular scene that starts out like Chris Evans chopping wood and then goes off into delightfully smutty territory. Things move pretty quickly, of course, partly thanks to a snowstorm, but there was quite a bit of tension buildup, as well. While Noah got a bit caveman-y for me towards the end, he showed a good deal of restraint by letting Mia make the first move, and following her lead. They were quite the sweet couple, though we do only get to see them develop in snippets over the course of about a month.
Overall, this is a quick steamy read! Perfect if you need a little bit of HEA but don’t have the time or mental space for a longer read!
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