3.5 out of 5 stars
Ebook. 1st edition. 53 pages. Published December 1st 2018 by Dreamspinner Press
Blurb:
The sexy Santa and the virgin dad….
Single dad Mario, twenty-one, has finally won shared custody of his five-year-old son, Sammy. They’re spending Christmas at a Tenerife resort to celebrate. The children’s swimming instructor, Josie, is sexy and fun, and Mario can’t stop dreaming about him. But Mario has no clue how to talk to a hot guy.
With his suntan, Speedos, and rippling abs, Josie seems to be the typical jock. He’s super sweet too, and everyone loves him. But he only has eyes for the fire-eyed little dad who looks like his son’s older brother and won’t stop policing the swimming class.
Sammy would like to be a king in the hotel’s nativity play. But he’s too afraid to go anywhere without his dad.
Mario would like a holiday romance with Josie, or even a little more, but between building his tech company and trying to do his part as Sammy’s father he has missed out on a lot and is too inexperienced to know where to begin.
Luckily Santa might have just the thing for everyone on his list…
A Story from the Warmest Wishes: Dreamspinner Press 2018 Advent Calendar
Likes:
- Well written.
- The hardships of a young, single father.
- Sammy’s change.
- Good smut.
Dislikes:
- Angsty as fuck.
- Nothing happened between Mario and Josie until late in the book.
- Tons of backstory for Josie and Sammy.
- Mario’s lack of self-esteem.
- The romance took backseat.
This story is bittersweet, but not the usual type of bittersweet I’m used to. It’s a bitter kind of angsty right up until it gets sweet. And while I enjoyed the story as a whole, it’s lacking as a romance.
Mario is so full of sell-esteem issues and angst that the first two thirds of the story are saturated with it. As a young single father, Mario’s been dumped on by just about everyone. Only his sister’s always had his back, which makes him assume that everyone’s always judging him and looking down on him.
To be fair, people are judging him. But they’re also a lot friendlier than they first appear. In that respect, I wish Mario had had as much of a change by the end of the book as Sammy. It took Mario ages to believe that Josie could like him. As in, nothing happened between them until 73% of the way through the story.
I almost think I would have liked this story without the sex scene and/or Mario being a virgin. If the focus was on Mario discovering that not everyone was judging him for being such a young dad, and he went through a bigger personal change, the happy ending would have packed more of a punch. As it was, the ending was more about the sex and Mario finally losing his virginity than it was about him growing as a person.
There’s a lot to this story, and it’s well written. My heart went out to Mario for all the hardships he’s been put through as a single father. This story deals with the double standards of parenthood very well. Given the amount of content packed into the story, a longer format would have allowed the romance to unfold better.
Find the Warmest Wishes anthology review here and the full list of stories here.
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