Charmer is live!

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Blurb

Nico

She serves me coffee late at night when I come around to write lyrics, but it’s not the caffeine I’ve gotten addicted to.

We’ve got the spark, but she’s the only woman in town who seems to be immune to my charms.

When it’s time for me to leave for my cross-country tour,I just can’t imagine not seeing her for months.

So I offer her a job on the road with me.

 

Kat

Everyone in LA knows that Nico Todd has a way with songs and with the ladies.

What he doesn’t know is that I would love to let him have his way with me.

But my life can only revolve around one infuriatingly cute guy—the six-year-old that I live with.

Imagine my surprise when Nico finds out about my little boy and tells me to bring him and my mom on the road too.

And imagine Nico’s surprise when he realizes my son is the biggest charmer of them all.

 

 

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Review

5 stars!

OMG, I am so in love with this book! Sweet, fun, dirty, laugh-out-loud funny, emotional and gorgeously romantic, it’s a fantastic rocker romance where the ex-manslut singer/songwriter falls hard for a single mother and her little boy in a chemistry-filled and fabulously functional love story. This story owned my heart from start to finish and I freaking loved it!

My newest rockstar crush, Nico Todd, was previously introduced in Sleeper (another fantastic read) as the older brother of Willa and best friend of Shane. There, he was established as a slutty player, sleeping his way around LA (and the rest of the country while he was on tour). In this book, we meet a new Nico, one who is completely smitten with the waitress at a late-night coffee shop.

It’s not like I come in here every night. That would be lame. I just think about coming here every night. I think about Kat.
This isn’t me.
It’s not good.
It’s not cool.
But hey, I’ve filled three notebooks with lyrics that vary from shitty to decent and recorded a dozen demos of songs that are basically about having a non-stop boner, so there’s that.

Kat’s life turned upside down when she discovered she was pregnant after a one night stand. But she picked herself up and has created a good life for herself and her six year old son, Tate. They live with her outrageously hilarious mother, and she works hard to be there for her boy, to the exclusion of all else… and that includes hot rockstars.

But Nico is not easily deterred, and when he learns that Kat’s passion is photography and film-making, he hires her to film a documentary of his upcoming tour. And to make things easier for her, he invites her son and mother to come along as well. It’s a proposition that she can’t resist, and so all aboard the tour bus for a two-month long trip.

I have absolutely no claim to him, but I still want to come to his shows wearing a T-shirt with his face on it that says I licked him—he’s mine!

It’s a great set up, made all the more entertaining because of the epic chemistry between Nico and Kat. The sexual tension absolutely sizzles! They want each other badly, but, for very valid reasons, Kat is reluctant to get involved. But nothing can diminish their attraction, and the flirting, teasing, want and longing builds and builds though scene after epic scene, and I was teetering with them on the edge, jittery with anticipation just waiting for something to happen.

I’m almost there now, are you ready?
Because I’m almost ready for you.

And was it worth the wait? Hell yes, it was! The romance that inevitably comes is sexy, intense and all-consuming, with lots of laughs, lots of banter, lots of romance and dirty talk, and a whole lot of sexy time! It’s a fantastic reflection of who Nico and Kate are and everything that is between them, and I loved every minute of it as they figure out their new and overwhelming feelings and just follow their hearts.

I’m a goner. I don’t know what ‘us’ means, and I don’t know if she wants me to be a part of her and her son’s world, and I barely even know what that world is like, but I want in.

I love seeing a romantic hero fall so desperately for his girl, and Nico absolutely melted my heart! He is absolutely beautiful with Kat, gentle, supportive and understanding, giving her nudges but not pushing too hard, and throwing himself out there absolutely and completely for her.

“I’m not exactly the same guy that I was before that first night I met you. I’m not the guy that I want to be for you yet either. All I can say is that I want the chance to become that guy for you. But I don’t know how to show you that if I can’t kiss you or touch you or do all the things that I want to do to you or say all the things that I want to say to you. So what do I do? Huh?”
He’s like an angsty teenage boy and all of my defenses, every part of me is melting. He rests his forehead against mine. I hold his head in my hands. His hands are in my hair. All I want to do is kiss him.
“I don’t want you to not be you, Nico. You’re amazing. I love being with you.”
“Then just fucking be with me.”

And Kat is a fantastic heroine! She’s a great mother who adores her son, and she has dreams of her own that she’s working towards. She’s strong enough to stand up for herself and do what she thinks is right for her and for Tate, and her concerns about a relationship are very valid. But she doesn’t make Nico work too hard for it, the woman has needs, a dirty mind and a filthy mouth and she more than matches him in the bedroom. Hotttt!

Tate needs his own shout out because he’s a great little character. He brings so much to the story, and pretty much every scene with Nico and Tate together is ovary-melting! Willa and Shane from Sleeper also appear, bringing their own brand of support to Nico in his quest to win his girl, and OMG, I laughed so much at their back and forth!  The journal entries are lots of fun, and all of the different elements of the story come together to create something really special.

It’s such a great mix of fun, sexy and emotional romance, and those epilogues left me smiling hugely when I finished. It’s only my second read from Kayley Loring, but it puts her firmly in my auto-buy list.

I loved it! 5 stars!

An Advanced Review Copy was generously provided by the author in exchange for an honest review.

 

Name in Lights

 

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Excerpt

I may have studied to be on the wrong side of the camera, because I am the Meryl Streep of acting like I don’t want to lock myself in a closet with Nico Todd and lick him all over.

I can feel his beautiful brown eyes on me as I walk away, but I’m not going to look back at him. If I look back at him, he’ll think I’m flirting. And I’m not flirting. I’m just a really awesome waitress who obsesses about the well-being and voice and eyelashes and butt and hands and full lips of all my customers. I check in with my other table to see if these non-Nico people want anything else, and quickly glance over my shoulder at him.

He’s scribbling in his notebook. Not looking at me. Good. Why should he? 

But praise the Disney gods, he grew up good. I wasn’t a huge fan of that wizard show—always more of a movie nerd—but I watched the first season if I was at home when it was on. I was thirteen and my friends had pictures of Shane Miller and Nico Todd up in their lockers. I may have had Annie Leibovitz portraits and stills from Ken Burns documentaries taped to mine, but I had eyes and hormones. Still do! 

I didn’t recognize him immediately the first time I saw him walk into the coffee shop, but my stomach flipped in a way that it hadn’t in years. We get all kinds of celebrities in here pretty much every night, because Beachwood is that kind of neighborhood. It’s a casual hipster restaurant, so most people roll in here wearing T-shirts and jeans, unless they’re talent agency doucheholes. But some people look better in T-shirts and jeans than others. Some people have that glow about them, even in a dimly lit retro coffee shop. And all the other waitresses who were on that shift were talking about Nico in the back of the house. It seemed like every one of them knew someone or had heard about someone who’d been out with him—once or twice. I’ve been somewhat out of the loop for about six years, so that was the first I’d heard of him becoming a musician, and that was when I knew for certain that he’d be off-limits for me. 

But I mean, it’s my job to take good care of him while he’s here. And to occasionally wonder what the fuck he’s up to when he isn’t here. And to think about him every time I take a shower. 

Because once I had listened to him on Spotify, I became a fan.

I fell in love with the songs and tried to stay detached from the singer.

Which is impossible, because he’s so good. His voice is sexy, sure, but he has this way of singing with his whole heart and soul even though he isn’t usually belting things out. And he’s got magic fingers because the way he plays guitar—I swear it feels like he’s strumming my clitoris. His songs are cool but warm at the same time, like an ice cream sundae. They’re all about women, of course, and it’s so easy to close your eyes and picture him singing to you. Even the songs that are about things not working out with a girl are somehow poignant and swoony.

But by the tenth time I’d listened to every song on all of his albums, I realized something: even though he writes and sings love songs—he never once says the words “I love you.”

Which is why he’d be nothing but trouble.

But I can still appreciate his talent when I’m alone, in the privacy of my bedroom.

I can still have a crush on him.

Everyone needs a little crush to get through the day.

 

 

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About the Author

Before writing steamy romantic comedy novels, Kayley Loring got a BFA in creative writing from a Canadian university and had a fifteen-year career as a screenwriter in Los Angeles (under a different name). She mostly wrote PG-13 family comedies that studios would pay her lots of money for and then never make into movies. In 2017 she decided to move to the Pacific Northwest and write about all the fun stuff that she wasn’t allowed to write about in those PG-13 scripts. Now she’s breathing cleaner air and writing dirtier words. It’s an adjustment she’s happily getting used to.

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