Candice Hern

Regency/Merry Widows series

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One of the best things about getting older is getting older along with girlfriends.

Surely, there are few things in life finer than time spent dishing over cocktails and noshes with women who've become as accepting and celebratory of themselves and their bodies as they are of the Great Truths of One's Early 40s --

Truth #1. At this point, hormones are still our friends: really, really excellent friends.

Truth #2. Even though we and our friends keep getting older, the guys who get the lot of us going keep getting -- gulp -- younger.

Therein lies one of the most popular premises in romance today: the younger man/older woman relationship.

The theme explores a real life near taboo, which leaves grown women in the 21st century apologizing for being loved by men who happen not to fit the "you need an older guy to take care of you and make you happy" bill of goods.

Imagine the prospect in 19th-century England, where a 35-year-old woman was considered long-in-the-tooth. The scandal attached to a woman of that age found cavorting with a man a few years less mature would be mortifying! Ruinous!

Utterly…delicious!

Just like Candice Hern's vibrant, sensual, and exceptionally entertaining new novel, "Just One of Those Flings."

From the sensually charged opening forward, Gabriel, Lord Thayne, is obsessed with finding the exotic woman with whom he trysted anonymously at a bal masqué.

Thayne is stunned to discover his masked lover is Beatrice, Lady Somerfield, the widowed aunt and chaperone of the young chit expected to bring the future duke, Thayne, up to scratch.

Beatrice is horrified, yet delightfully flattered. Once Thayne assures her he'll no longer court her niece, Beatrice decides the younger man will do nicely as the paramour for whom she's been looking since she and her fellow Merry Widows club members decided taking a man to their beds, while never again taking one to wed, would be just the thing.

Yet Beatrice doesn't bargain for Thayne wanting a bit of a say in the way their affaire progresses, nor does she want to make a choice between his loving her or her giving up the independence she's only begun to enjoy.

Hern writes the best kind of romances -- ones with the love story front and center and told with solid writing, a strong sense of purpose, and unapologetic eroticism.

She envelops the reader in the depth, the sensuality, and the fantasy of the story so that before one is aware -- the last page has turned with nothing, nothing having jarred one from the romantic reading experience.

And Hern makes "Just One of Those Things" about the relationship between two loving, sensual humans who respect one another, rather than just a clichéd bit of erotic romance exploiting a regular, old, healthy female fantasy.

This reminds me of Great Truth of the Early 40s #3, which goes something like this: If you adore the idea of an outrageously sensual and emotionally fulfilling affair with an experienced man a few vigorous years younger than yourself, don't wreck any good things you've already got.

Instead, think "Just One of Those Flings," then hie yourself off to --

Buy the book.

www.CandiceHern.com

Next week's review and AuthorView: "Swept Away," by Toni Blake