Review: Possession (Explicitly Yours, #1) by Jessica Hawkins

                                                     

Print Length: 159 pages

Publisher: Jessica Hawkins (November 4, 2014)

From Goodreads.com: Lola’s heart already belongs to Johnny, but for him, she’d sell the devil her soul. Unfortunately, the devil wants something else.

Beau Olivier is the kind of wealthy that buys anything—even people. When he makes Lola Winters a proposition, she finds herself tempted into a seduction that will have her walking the line between comfort and humiliation, desire and resistance. He would own her—for one night. She would be his—for a price. It was wrong. It was scandalous. It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Sex, music, neon on the Sunset Strip—right in the middle of it all, he would have her. Come sunrise, he would let her go. At least, that was the plan.

  

                                                         *******************

My Rating: 1 star out of 5

God, what a waste of a perfectly good afternoon. From the characters to the plot, this was just one giant mess of wasted potential (that then has the audacity to end on a cliff-hanger). 

Let's start with the characters shall we? First up we have Lola, and from the get-go we can see that she wants more out of life. For the past several years she has been in a relationship with a man named Johnny, and helping him run a bar that is on its last legs. In the beginning, she is open with her thoughts, she wants to go back to school. She isn't afraid to move on from the bar into a different job. She wants to get married. But she's stuck in a rut and that ruts name is Johnny. 

There is no nice way of saying it. He has no ambition whatsoever and is happy to spend his life behind a bar living paycheck to paycheck. He keeps telling Lola they will "figure it out", going so far as to get angry with her when she talks of getting married and how they could have a small wedding in the local park. Of course he calls himself a failure saying he can't provide for her, but he does nothing to actually better his circumstances. Lola even says all of the raises he has gotten at the bar, she has advocated for on his behalf. Of course he "allows" her agree to the proposition because it will benefit him the most. 

And of course, we can't forget Beau. The man with more money than common sense who sees Lola, spends one evening in her company and decides he MUST have her. Even going so far as to offer a solution to their problems. If she agrees to spend one night with him, he'll give them enough money to buy the bar and still have some left over. The man who runs so hot and cold that I spent half of this already considerably short book wishing he would get a well deserved foot in the crotch. 

And while that basically sums up the plot of this one as well, I'm going to dive in a little deeper. I hated the way that Lola was willing to sacrifice everything, going so far as to offer up her body for one night in order to make Johnny's dreams come true. Even when confronted about what she wanted, Lola had no answer, which made me wonder what happened to the girl who we met at the beginning of the book who was willing to walk away and start over. Who wanted more for herself than the life she currently had. I found it implausible that she couldn't see just how... useless Johnny was and had been. 

Now for a man who has just spent one million dollars for the use of a woman's body for roughly twelve hours, Beau certainly goes out of his way to not only spend more (buying her a dress and accessories for a fancy event he wants her to attend with him as well as some ridiculously expensive lingerie), but also to be an absolute jerk. He runs so hot and cold the entirety of this story that I'm surprised Lola didn't get whiplash. I certainly felt like I did. One minute he's acting the part of a gentleman, the next he's demanding she do things that she repeatedly says she doesn't want to do (with another woman not with him mind you). Then he's telling her to stay, only to push her away moments later and refuse to even let her shower before returning her home to her boyfriend. 

Only to have it end on a cliff-hanger where absolutely nothing is resolved other than Lola has successfully earned the million dollars needed so that Johnny can achieve his dream of owning the bar. I saw after the fact that there are three other stories in this series (one being told from Beau's point of view), but at this time I highly doubt I am going to continue on. I just don't care enough about any of these characters or their stupid choices.

The plus side to all of this was that it was short enough that I easily finished it in an afternoon, so it has that going for it.