Billionaire for the Night by Venus Ray, Stacy-Deanne

Look. I get that short stories are hard. You have to put together a story and draw people in quickly. But it also makes it a LOT harder to turn around assholes for the readers. And James is an asshole. He's rich and handsome and the worst stereotype of the two. There's no discernible reason why Kelly would agree to help him out. With 41 pages, there is no room for redemption. And the next book in the series is another couple so we'll never see more. 

One and a half stars

This short story came out May 29, 2021

Followed by Billionaire Takes the Bride

Ebook from Kindle

Opinions are my own

Dearly Beloved by Mary Jo Putney

Oh dear God. I wish I had known this was a reissue before I requested an ARC from . I may have enjoyed this book if I had read it when it came out in 1990 but the romance genre and what readers find romantic has changed a LOT since then. The writing is flowery, the story breaks the bounds of belief suspension, and the book starts off with the "hero" raping the heroine and veers into child abuse. With so many recent good books by Ms. Putney, what editor thought that re-releasing this book was a good idea? It's bound to turn new readers away from ever trying her books again.
Diana Lindsay is still young and very beautiful. She struggles to make ends meet and keep her son in food. When she rescues a courtesan from a blizzard, she realizes that there may be a way to make ends meet and immediately becomes a protege, knowing that giving up her body will lead her son to a better life.
Gervase Brandelin, the Viscount St. Aubyn, knows that he is a monster. That is why he tries to contain his base urges to the members of the demimonde, women who know how to handle the darkness inside him. On the night that Diana makes her "debut," Gervase decides to claim her as his own...
I would have rated this one star if I didn't reserve it for DNFs.

One and a half stars
This book comes out June 25th
ARC kindly provided by Kensington Books and NetGalley
Opinions are my own

Change of Heart by Jude Deveraux

The best thing I can say about "Change of Heart" is that, between this book and "For All Time," I'm finally ready to give up Deveraux as a Must-Read. I will probably never be able to give her up fully (Sweet Liar alone keeps my hopes up) but the last few two and a half miler books have gotten rounded up to three stars based on sentiment alone.
I actually squeed and did a happy dance when I realized that Eli and Chelsea were getting a story. Children from an earlier Deveraux short story, the two drifted apart but are now ready to find each other and their own HEA.

Wow. Just. wow. I kept reading to see if Chelsea would really put up with all of Eli's shit. I was so hoping that she'd just pop him one. I mean, Eli heads straight past Alpha and sails into Asshole. He sees Chelsea in a picture, decides she's not happy and that he's going to fix her life. She's too skinny, so he changes her restaurant order. She hates camping so he takes her into the woods (and then gets pissed off when she complains). He pours the guilt on her for their childhood friendship ending and her never noticing him as a male, when he never stepped up to show her how much he loved her. And then tells his teenage doppelganger Scully that he knows she would have just laughed at him. And she puts up with all of this shit. I wasn't too impressed with Chelsea either. She complains that no one ever expected anything of her because she was so pretty. This is after Deveraux has clearly shown that her parents did expect more of her and then goes on to explain that Chelsea wasn't even the prettiest of her sisters. Pilar- she doesn't want to work with Eli and doesn't really like him but then they're portrayed to be friends. She helps out disconnecting lights and stealing papers but then tells Chelsea that she's never given any responsibility. And what school in this day and age would let unknown adults attend prom? I just... I can't even... My level of suspended disbelief was so beyond stretched at that point that I... argh.