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My best friend is married.
Everyone I know is married. It doesn’t bother me. I like my life the way it is.
Since I’m single though, when my best friend and her husband finally decide to go on their dream honeymoon, she asks me to watch their three-year-old son.
Of course I say yes.
What my best friend neglects to tell me is that I won’t be babysitting alone.
Feeling Max might be too much for me to handle, her husband asks his only single friend to help.
Nick Carrington and I have met a couple of dozen times. I’ve never really given him a second thought—other than to say he’s kind of a jerk. Out loud. So he can hear. Sure, he’s tall, dark, and handsome. And yes, he has the best ass I’ve ever seen, and I mean ever seen quite literally. You see he mooned me at last year’s Fourth of July barbecue because, like I said, he’s a jerk.
He always has to be the life of the party.
He’s also arrogant.
Imposing.
Rich.
And a playboy.
I’d even go as far as to say he’s a manwhore.
Yet somehow before I know it, this manwhore and I are co-parenting. Living under the same roof. Eating meals together and yes, talking.
Don’t look at me like that—it’s not like I had a choice. Even though I knew every minute would be hell, I had to say yes.
But after two weeks what I didn’t expect is that I’d been wrong about him.
That under his smart-ass exterior, he’s quite charming.
That his arrogance is actually confidence.
And that the sight of his naked body would do really bad things to me.
So yes, I’ve misjudged him. And yes, I like him. Really like him. Although there are times I still think he’s a jerk…I now think he’s a sexy jerk.
And I want more of him.
The question is—does he want more of me?
My Thoughts:
Sexy Jerk is my third Kim Karr book, and to some degree it follows the basic formula of Ms. Karr’s prior two books. Although Sexy Jerk is billed as a romantic comedy, there are not many humorous scenes. However, this is a nice “frienemies” romance with an interesting twist.
Thrown together to babysit their Godson, Nick and Tess discover that they’ve grossly misjudged each other. One of the more interesting twists to this story is main character Nick. He truly is a nice guy. He might not be well versed in romancing a woman, but he is genuine, generous, and gracious. He isn’t the guy who only becomes nice after meeting the right woman. It doesn’t take long for Tess to figure out that Nick is not only sexy, but he’s not a jerk.
Tess, a culinary school graduate, is good at managing a restaurant, mediocre in the kitchen, and not so hot a judge of character. In addition to misjudging Nick, Tess totally misreads her prior boyfriend and her prospective landlord, Mathias Bigelow. Even after getting a really bad vibe from Bigelow she foolishly provides too much information to his agent.
Naturally, the dissemination of information leads to escalating confrontations between Nick and Bigelow. When you’re dealing with an unscrupulous underhanded man with nefarious connections, you can expect the confrontations to become violent.
This scintillatingly sinister subplot could have been a fantastic conflict, but Ms. Karr brought that storyline to a boil, then took the pot off the stove. The conflict was used solely to bring Tess and Nick back together after a misunderstanding. It wasn’t fully developed or played out. When the conflict resolution is reported in the epilogue, I felt cheated out of a meatier book.
In the end, Sexy Jerk wasn’t much of a romantic comedy or a thriller, but it was a nice-enough contemporary romance. The story of Nick and Tess becoming a couple is good, and the addition of under-developed industrial espionage/sabotage story was unnecessary.
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Go to Kim Karr’s Facebook Page to enter her Release Day Giveaway!
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Kim Karr is a New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal Bestselling author.
She grew up in Rochester, NY and now lives in Florida with her husband and four kids. She’s always had a love for reading books and writing. Being an English major in college, she wanted to teach at the college level but that was not to be. She went on to receive an MBA and became a project manager until quitting to raise her family. Kim currently works part-time with her husband and recently decided to embrace one of her biggest passions–writing.
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