Mariner's Cove

In case you haven't gotten it yet from the recent set of reviews, I really enjoy reading. Nothing beats the feeling of a book in my hands, waiting to be read.  As such, I held off on getting an e-reader for as long as I could.  But nearly 2 years ago, I broke down and bought a Nook for one simple reason - my mom did.  Mom would buy books, read them, and then pass them along to me; unfortunately, I can't really support this habit without that right now.  So when she got a Nook for Christmas, set up her account and gave me the password to read what she downloaded - I decided my Christmas money was going to have to go to a Nook Simple Touch.  

Why am I giving you this whole bit about a Nook? Well - this book I just read is one that I wouldn't have picked out on my own.  But since it was there and I had no strong feelings on what else to read, I figured might as well give it a go. After just finishing The Forgotten Garden - which was long and intense- and then The Great Gatsby - which while short was still pretty intense, classic and all that- I figured I could go for something a bit more mindless.

And Mariner's Cove by E. Ayers was just that - mindless.

Three years after her husband dies in the line of duty as a police officer, Nikki travels to the town of Mariner's Cove for a vacation away from her children and the parents she's lived with since her husband's passing.  There she meets her landlord - Archer Brooklyn IV.  I'm sure I don't need to post SPOILER ALERT before this because I'm sure anyone would assume the result - they fall in love and live happily ever after.

Like I said - mindless.

But mindless isn't always a bad thing.  A cheap cheesy romance novel can be just what the doctor ordered sometimes.  But this was.... more creepy than cheesy.

Most cheap romances seem to have a gimmick-y kind of thing. Maybe she's a princess and he's a poor beggar.  Maybe she's a werewolf and he's a vampire.   A little some-something to make the couple a little different from the hundreds (thousands? more zeros than that?) of romance novels in the world.  Something to propel the story and give it a little bit of plot more than meet, fall in love, live happily ever after, the end.

Oh there's a gimmick here - she thinks he's gay.  She mentally refers to herself as "his beard" (a cover-up giving a homosexual person the appearance of being heterosexual).  It's not until weeks into their "relationship" (I guess you could call it?) that she says this out loud and finds out he's straight.

Maybe he didn't realize she thought he's gay? Oh no - he knows.  When the story's in his perspective, it is quite clear that he realizes she thinks he's gay but doesn't see fit to clarify this for her.  She's the one making assumptions and why should he correct her if she doesn't ask?

She makes assumptions and as such, invites him into the bathroom when she's taking a bath to discuss their business opportunity (he's a lawyer opening a new practice and she just graduated from a paralegal program - because that's the way things work in these kind of novels).  From her point of view, she thinks she would not have invited him in if he wasn't gay and from his point of view, he thinks she would not have invited him in if she didn't think he was gay.  But he's not gay - he's just a creepy creepy guy.

He later says he didn't want to hurt their friendship by admitting the truth - but watching a woman bathe because she thinks you're not attracted to women is royally screwed up and how does that not interfere a friendship?

I wasn't loving the book before the bath scene and pretty much wrote it off there.  I finished reading it because it's really hard for me to leave a book unfinished once I get far enough into it (and the bath scene in Chapter 4 was far enough I guess).  The rest of the book was pretty typical from there.  He's rich and gives her plenty of perks to be his paralegal, she meets his kid, her family moves there, he meets her kids, the children are all pretty surly but come around, she finds out he's not gay, there's a (rather awkward) sex scene, he proposes, they all live her happily ever after, the end.

I guess anyone can get their happily ever after, even creepy not-gay guys who mislead women into letting him see her naked.