Guest Review: Nothing But Sex by Fran Lee

A stand-alone story in the Cougar Challenge series.

Lee Blackhorse is hardly Cougar material, no matter what her friends over at Tempt the Cougar say. A forty-two-year-old woman who lusts after her thirty-year-old weekend helper is just plain nuts. Or is she? Mike Running Elk is the sexiest thing ever to don tight jeans and a second-skin t-shirt. She’s secretly yearned for the man for years.

When Mike shows up at her door with an injured hand, he notices Lee can’t pull her eyes off his naked, ripped chest. Mike can’t believe she’s as oblivious as she acts. The ice has been broken and he intends to heat things up even more!

The title of this novella is really inaccurate to the nature of this romantic tale. “Nothing But Sex” is what Lee Blackhorse wants to label her budding relationship with Mike Running Elk. But he has worked for Lee ever since he was in his early 20’s and has been her friend and weekend worker since her drunken, gambling, almost actor ex-husband ran off with a 20-something babe seven years earlier. The only “dates” Lee has been offered were by married men on the reservation, and she is tired of all that nonsense. Their wives are her friends. She knows what she felt like in the 20 years her husband did the same thing to her. Yet she is hungry for warmth, caring, attention, being made to feel desirable again, even though she is absolutely convinced that she is the poster girl for “over the hill.”

Lee doesn’t know that Mike has been secretly in love with her for six years, has been waiting for her to somehow begin to see him as a man in his own right, and has been building a successful business as a dealer and trainer of top-notch horses of all breeds. He has continued to work for Lee every weekend simply to be around her, and when he cuts his hand badly on a barbed wire fence, he sees his chance to convince her that he can be an important person in her life.

I think this is one of the “older woman/younger man” stories I have been reading lately that I have come to enjoy and like just about as well as any. I can resonate with Lee—a woman who has been made to feel like she is a dried up old roofing shingle rather than the woman of character, experience, both inner and outer beauty, and a heart as big as they come. I have met so many women who have been chewed up and spit out by men who treat them like dirt, and I mourn for all the pain and inner self-doubt that their lives have engendered in them. Oh, for more men like Mike Running Elk who is gentle, caring, an authentic person who sees Lee, not for just what she is (which he thinks is “hot” no matter what she says), but also for what he knows she can become when given the kind of care and attention he wants to lavish upon her. Their relationship certainly starts out as a sexual one, but Fran Lee has written a wonderful story about a “coming out” of one’s shell that is beautiful and truly classic in its qualities.

Fran Lee is new to me as an author, but she has handled the Native American/white encounters well, has dealt well with the matters of abuse that are often the aftermath of a marriage that ends over drink and a lack of true respect. I think you, too, will like this story.

I give a rating of 4.5 out of 5.


You can read more from Judith at Dr J’s Book Place