Review: Wife by Wednesday by Catherine Bybee

Burning thoughts:
Him: I want my wife in my bed, and I'm willing to woo and seduce to get her there.
Her: You can never trust men and their motives. Their wants will always come first. 

Wife by Wednesday by Catherine Bybee kicks off the Weekday Brides series – four books so far – and I must say, it's such a fun and easy though no less evocative romance read. The premise of the story has been used so many times in so many ways in Romanceland that it's gotten very old and very tired: a secret marriage of convenience made safe and foolproof by an airtight contract.  Still when I saw it on sale on Kindle and read the blurb, I couldn't resist the one-click buy. I'm a sucker that way.

What hooked me though is a lot of curiosity. What kind of spin is Ms. Bybee going to do using this age-old romance plot?

You know a marriage of convenience in a romance has a set trajectory. Boy and girl – regardless of how they meet – enter into a contract to marry (hopefully with eyes wide open), attraction sizzles, sometimes they bicker, hijinks follows, and then the couple end up truly married. So what's different with Wife by Wednesday?

A lot of fun - and sexy - things obviously, when you've got a writer who's willing to explore how far characters who're not shy about who they are, their motivations and what they want, would dare go.

First lines

Ms. Bybee plunges us immediately into the premise at Paragraph One: Blake Harrison, current Duke of Albany and a wealthy entrepreneur in his own right, belabors his pressing problem to his BFF.

"I need a wife, Carter, and I needed her yesterday." Riding in the back of a town car, end route to a Starbucks, of all places, Blake Harrison glanced at his watch for the tenth time that hour.

Review: Seven Years to Sin by Sylvia Day

Burning questions:
Him: What she knows of my past is already something that’s too much to accept. If she knows the whole story, will she finally avoid me?
Her: He already has a piece of me that nobody has ever had, not even my husband. Can I turn my back on what has been my entire life and give him the rest of me?

The premise of Sylvia Day’s Seven Years to Sin—a romance that stayed on both the New York Times and USA Today’s bestseller lists for nine weeks—is one that’s surely part of the conundrums—and horrified fascinations—that women sometimes think about: What will I do if I saw someone I’m attracted to in bed with another woman?

Ms. Day admits that this is the sparky thought that zinged into her mind when the romance behind Seven Years to Sin came to her. I must say, it’s also sparked off a few burning thoughts in mine.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First lines

Seven Years to Sin is one of those books that I went in reading blind—something that I rarely do. Because I hate bad surprises in my romance reading.

But I’ve heard so many good things about Ms. Day’s stories, not to mention several romances on bestseller lists, that I took the plunge despite not having read the blurb for this romance.

And the opening salvo only whetted my appetites:

There was something irresistibly exciting about watching athletic males engaged in physical combat. Their base, animalistic natures were betrayed by their unmitigated aggression and ruthlessness. Through their exertions, their bodies displayed a power that stirred a woman’s most primitive instincts.

Lady Jessica Sheffield was not immune, as she’d been taught a lady should be.