Making Whoopie (Hot Cakes #3) by Erin Nicholas-Review & Excerpt tour
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ABOUT THE BOOK: Release Date June 30, 2020
This marriage of convenience is about to get sticky.
Getting hitched for the health insurance is not Jocelyn Asher’s idea of romance.
But the hospital quote has really frosted her cookies, and suddenly, “I’m rich. We should just get married,” sounds a whole lot more swoony.
Especially when the man proposing is this gorgeous. And takes her to parties featuring champagne and petit fours. She’s a sucker for anything with bubbles or icing. And just like that she finds herself married to a near stranger.
Grant Lorre is usually allergic to spontaneity.
So why did he ask the beautiful small-town baker he had a one-stand with to marry him? Somehow watching her lick batter off a whisk–not a euphemism–made a wedding and a little fraud seem like a sweet idea.
They’ll just play house and make some whoopie–pies, of course–for a few months and then move on with their separate lives. Until then, bring on the cream filling. And that is a euphemism.
But as things heat up even outside of the kitchen, they quickly realize there’s no recipe to follow when it comes to love.
••••••••
REVIEW:MAKING WHOOPIE is the third instalment in Erin Nicholas’ contemporary, adult HOT CAKES erotic, romance series focusing on the new owners and investors in the Hot Cakes snack company in Appleby, Iowa (Aiden, Dax, Cam, Ollie and Grant). This is Hot Cakes co-owner Grant Lorre, and baker/cake decorator Jocelyn Asher’s story line. MAKING WHOOPIE can be read as a stand alone without any difficulty. Any important information from the previous story line is revealed where necessary.
SOME BACKGROUND: Several months earlier, business partners Aiden, Dax, Cam, Ollie and Grant bought the faltering Hot Cakes snack company in Appleby, Iowa saving the town in the process. These are their stories.
Told from dual third person perspectives (Grant and Jocelyn) MAKING WHOOPIE follows the marriage of convenience between Hot Cakes co-owner Grant Lorre, and baker/cake decorator Jocelyn Asher. Jocelyn Asher works at for her best friend Zoe McCaffery’s home town bakery called Buttered Up, and in the previous weeks, Grant Lorre, one of the new co-owners of the Hot Cakes Factory has visited Buttered Up every morning. At a family dinner where Grant Lorre has been invited, feeling stupid and left out, Jocelyn leaves in an effort to get away from the magnetic pull towards the man that catches her eye. Blurting out her feelings, Grant takes advantage of Jocelyn’s moment of weakness, and finds himself spending a night ‘making whoopie’ but all is not well in Jocelyn’s life, and Grant makes our heroine an offer she cannot refuse. What ensues is a marriage of convenience, and the potential fall-out when Grant admits he doesn’t do coupling, and believes a woman should be able to go it alone.
Jocelyn Asher loves working for Zoe McCaffery but working for Zoe isn’t making our heroine rich. Struggling with a personal emergency Grant offers Jocelyn a temporary reprieve that sees our couple married, if only for the short term. Grant Lorre is all about financial independence and teaches women how to invest and survive in the real world but miscommunication and a need to see Jocelyn succeed finds our couple at odds including the permanency of their days old marriage.
The relationship between Jocelyn and Grant is one of mutual attraction but Grant’s quiet demeanor belies a man who is disinterested in our story line heroine until Jocelyn takes the first steps towards her own happily ever after. The $ex scenes are intimate and passionate and FUN, without the use of over the top, sexually graphic language and text.
The colorful and energetic secondary and supporting characters include Grant’s partners Aiden, Dax, Cam and Ollie; Zoe McCaffery, and Jocelyn’s sister Paige, Jane, Kelsey, Aspen and Henry.
MAKING WHOOPIE is a story of friends, family, relationships and love; a sugary tale about a quirky baker and a guarded hero with a white knight complex who believes all women should be financially independent. The premise is sweet and spicy; the characters are spirited; the romance is furious and fun.
Reading Order and Previous Reviews
Sugar Coated
Forking Around
Copy supplied for review
Reviewed by Sandy
That was ridiculous. There was nothing sexy about cheesy potatoes. Or potatoes without cheese, for that matter.
But lust? Well, that was a possibility. Apparently.
Because watching Grant Lorre eat cheesy potatoes across her best friend’s mother’s dining room table was making Jocelyn Asher hot.
Of course, Maggie McCaffery’s cheesy potatoes were award-winning. Seriously. She’d taken home the purple ribbon four times from the Dubuque County Fair and twice from the Iowa State Fair. And Grant seemed to agree that they were delicious. He’d made a sexy groaning sound when he’d first taken a bite, and Josie had been mesmerized as his lips closed around the tines of his fork. Never mind how her heart rate had picked up when he’d turned the fork and licked it.
She was a mess. Purple ribbon or not, Josie was pretty sure that getting worked up over watching a man eat potatoes meant she was hard up.
She took a long drink of iced tea and tried to remember the last time she’d had sex. If she wasn’t forgetting anyone—and how sad would that be—the last time had been with Ben Davis. After Kara Davis’s, now Tibbin’s, wedding.
Last week Kara had been into Buttered Up, the bakery where Josie worked with her best friend Zoe, to order a miniature version of her wedding cake to celebrate their first anniversary.
Josie sighed. That had to explain the sexy potato thing going on across the table. It had to.
But then Grant laughed at something Aiden, his best friend and Zoe’s fiancé—yes, it was one big happy group at this table—said, and Josie felt her neglected lady parts clench. Yeah, it wasn’t the potatoes.
Thankfully.
Kind of.
As weird as getting turned on by potatoes might be, it might have been preferable to being turned on by the man who had been coming into the bakery nearly every morning for the past two weeks, but hadn’t so much as asked her to have a cup of coffee with him.
He’d asked her if the blueberries in the muffins were locally sourced. He’d asked her if they had any gluten-free cinnamon scones. He’d asked her for a lemon slice for his cup of hot water. But that was pretty much the extent of the things he’d asked her over the course of the time they’d known each other.
Oh, and he’d caught her when she’d fallen off a ladder. Twice. Very gallantly.
He’d swept her up before she’d hit the floor. Like a freaking knight in shining armor.
But both times he’d simply set her on her feet and gone on with his day.
She, on the other hand, was now getting hot and bothered by side dishes.
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Erin Nicholas has been writing romances almost as long as she’s been reading them. To date, she’s written over thirty sexy, contemporary novels that have been described as “toe-curling,” “enchanting,” “steamy,” and “fun.” She adores reluctant heroes, imperfect heroines, and happily ever afters.
Erin lives in the Midwest, where she enjoys spending time with her husband (who only wants to read the sex scenes in her books), her kids (who will never read the sex scenes in her books), and her family and friends (who claim to be “shocked” by the sex scenes in her books).
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