Melina Parker has always excelled in two things: research followed by hands-on application. She prides herself on being a lady in public, but after she’s dumped yet again for being a lady in the bedroom, she’s ready to go back to school.
Determined to find her inner sex diva, she enlists her childhood friend, Max Dalton, to tutor her after hours. Instead, she ends up in the wrong bed and gets a lesson in passion from Max’s twin brother, Rhys Dalton, a man Melina’s always secretly wanted but never thought she could have.
Despite craving the occasional adventure, Melina’s a small-town girl who wants roots and a family. Rhys and Max, on the other hand, are celebrities who travel from one city to another, changing bed partners as easily as plane flights. Rhys is outwardly the more reserved of the two but, unable to believe his good luck when he finds Melina waiting for him, he gives Melina her first taste of multiples right out the gate. Come morning, she’s so mortified that she threw herself at Rhys that she blurts out the truth about her tutoring experiment. Not about to let her get away from him, Rhys convinces Melina that when it comes to sexual lessons, he’s more than man enough for the job. His biggest challenge is teaching Melina that when it comes to pleasure, the key to his own is hers.
Can a woman who’s always longed for hearth and home find satisfaction with a man whose entire life has been about moving on to the next big thing?
Melina recently broke up with her boyfriend when she found him with another woman. He told her that if she hadn’t been so bad in bed then he wouldn’t have strayed. Ass. Anyway, apparently two other men told her the same thing so now she’s got a complete complex about sex. She wants to learn how to please a man in bed and since she has her eye on a professor at the university she works at she wants to be her best.
Melina has always loved her friend Rhys, she’s just never known how to tell him. Now it’s been years since they’ve been close so when her friends challenge her to “practice” sex so that she’ll get good for her professor Melina asks Max to help her out. Max is Rhys’s identical twin and while they are nothing alike in personality no one can tell them apart but Melina. Max agrees to the help a friend out but then plays them both and sends Rhys in as his pinch hitter. Max just didn’t bother to tell neither Rhys nor Melina that he was doing this, thinking that he can finally get them together.
Rhys is thrilled that Melina has finally come to him and Melina’s shocked that she’s feeling so much with her friend Max (she doesn’t have her glasses on so she can’t tell them apart) so they’re both surprised when they discovered the switch. They’re both mad but Rhys doesn’t want to let Melina get away so agrees to continue “teaching” her for the rest of the weekend. This leads them both to showing more of their feelings for each other than they’re comfortable with but Rhys is willing to try to work on the relationship and the obstacles that stand in their way. Melina, however, has major issues though and can’t see how things will ever work out and this keeps them apart.
I really enjoyed this friends-to-lovers story. I thought the whole set up with Max making the switch with his brother without either Rhys or Melina knowing about it was horribly sneaky but I understood why he felt the need to do it…and he felt guilty for something that had happened long ago.
Rhys was such a conflicted man. He loved being a magician but being on the road constantly took its toll – or at least it was beginning to. He really enjoyed being behind the scenes and coming up with the tricks more than he liked being in the limelight. Getting closer with Melina was his dream. He’d loved her for so long but they’d drifted apart in their awkwardness. Being able to spend the weekend with her – even if it was under the guise of “teaching” her was A-OK with him. He really was a good man with a good heart and that came out in spades in this story.
Melina was a good character as well but I did have a problem with her self-esteem issues. She wasn’t good enough, skinny enough, beautiful enough, etc. She just needed to be herself and let all that garbage floating around in her head go and she would have been fine. Now for this story it worked because it put her into Rhys’s arms but the self-doubt kind of got old after a while.
Overall, however I really liked the novella and had a great time reading it.
Rating: 4 out of 5
(Originally released in 2010 under the title This Magic Moment.)
Thank you for reviewing BTWB. I'm glad you enjoyed it!