~Blog Tour~ Guilty Pleasures by Manuela Cardiga

 
 
 
Guilty Pleasures
The Food and Fornication Fables 
By
Manuela Cardiga

 

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Category: Romance/ Erotica 
Publication Date: December 5th 2013
 
 
Summary:
 
Gorgeous, narcissistic Lance Packhard—a sex therapist specializing in helping anorgasmic women—is writing a revolutionary book entitled Sexual Secrets of a Sexual Surrogate.
When a ruthless mother offers him an enormous sum to impregnate her daughter, Millicent Deafly, a debt-ridden Lance hesitantly agrees.
Millicent, however, isn’t into sex. She’s carefree, joyfully voluptuous, and dedicated to her palate. Lance will only get her attention if he dabs soy sauce on his pulse points.
To get close to her, a determined Lance takes a job at Millicent’s dinner club, Guilty Pleasures, as an assistant to her irascible and eccentric chef, Serge Moreno.
But for Lance, nothing goes according to plan. He’s not only failing to seduce Millie, he’s falling madly in love with her.
Lance’s life becomes next to impossible when his best friend, George, gets married and wants to hold the reception at Guilty Pleasures. Will the truth be uncovered?


Manuela Cardiga was born in Mozambique and raised in South Africa where she studied fashion design. She moved to Europe where she worked as a fashion designer, then moved to the crazy world of advertising as a graphic designer and copywriter. Manuela is a designer by profession, a cook by vocation, and a writer by compulsion. She currently resides in Lisbon, Portugal where she writes contemporary and historical fiction, designs book covers, illustrates children’s books, and mothers a gorgeous daughter while juggling a day job. She also dabbles enthusiastically in exotic, experimental cuisine, much to the discomfort of family and friends.

Click HERE to watch a personal interview with Manuela Cardiga!

 
4 stars****
 
Gosh, this book made me very, very hungry.... 
Lillie and her love affair with food is definitely a distraction when it comes to her romance life.  This is a  slow building romance with most of the "steam" occurring  after the 50% mark.   In order to really like this book you need to be someone who appreciates and loves food and likes having it described to you in such detail it makes your mouth water.  I quite liked this part of the book...  had me wanting to head to my kitchen and whip up something hot, delicious and steamy!
Guilty Pleasures is a dining club and those who are members book dining experiences that appeal to their food fantasies. The majority of the book focuses on these very interesting and entertaining events that occur at Guilty Pleasures. Each dinner party is unique and entertaining and full of characters from the naughty to the eccentric and sometimes just ordinary people doing ordinary things like parents needing a night off from cooking or a birthday celebration.
My favorite character was the dwarf who is a whiz in the kitchen but has a foul mouth and a foul attitude against people in general. He's one of those characters that you kinda' roll your eyes because you can't believe what comes out of his mouth but at the same time he has qualities that you admire.
Will was sent on a mission to seduce Lillie by her mother who wants a grandchild and is willing to pay a hefty sum to get what she wants. Will is a Sex therapist and she is certain he is up to the task. He is also working on a self-help book and the beginning of each chapter always starts with an excerpt from his book... tips for those who need advise on how to properly seduce a woman. Some of these were very amusing... or eye rolling.
Will didn't expect to find himself up against a challenge like Lillie and he definitely didn't expect to fall in love. I loved this very slow moving tension filled romance that bloomed between them. And, I think Will got some sex therapy in reverse.
So, a book for food lovers, lovers of slow building passion and eccentric characters. I loved the originality of this story and I do love food so this book worked for me.

ARC provided by The Writers Coffee Shop via netgalley

 


“Can you believe this, Will? Here we place fake dew on berries, for people who sell fake dreams and pay real money so they can eat real food without anyone knowing. Amazing. They go out and eat macro/micro/molecular or whatever is in fashion for the week, when their bodies crave something fat and rich . . . we are like a dirty secret. They come and eat with their han...ds and they lick their fingers. Here is the world.”

Lance laughed and shook his head.

Serge waved the spray mister about. “People are ashamed to eat good food in decent portions in public, but you get a two-bit whore teaching bored housewives how to give great head on morning TV.” He sighed and shook his head. “And let me tell you, she didn’t know what she was talking about. Best practitioner of fellatio in the world was the Empress of China.”

Lance’s jaw dropped. “Empress of . . . are you serious?”

“What an artist . . . the man could make a stone come. He was a eunuch, a real pure from birth, reared in the Forbidden City. He trained us—the new arrivals—decided on our speciality, and our look. He was an old, old man when I knew him, but he still had all his own teeth, and was limber and graceful as a gazelle. A very wise man. He told me I had to decide, as a freak, if I’d rather be a clown or a demon. He said we oddities—and he spoke from experience—attracted the cowardly and the cruel. Easy targets for the unimaginative, you see.”

Lance nodded soberly. “A wise man, your friend.”
Serge smiled grimly. “Yes, he was. So I was the demon, and Yusuf was the angel. What a spectacle we were, Will. Food for the gods’ lust, or the devils’. Yusuf was a hermaphrodite, see. Beautiful, Will. Never have I seen a more beautiful face. He had breasts and a body to make Aphrodite weep with envy, and a man’s prick he had, but the Empress always presented him fully clothed in a long white virginal shift, his hair loose like an angel’s, and then he’d wet the shift down. It would cling, see, the breasts of Venus, the prick of Mars. Some bastards would pay to see us freaks together.”
“My God, Serge, how did you stay sane?”

“Willie, things are simple. You do what you do to survive. We all pander to the powerful’s desires, don’t we? Only today, it’s even worse. Since survival is practically guaranteed, these people obsess over the basic things that signify survival—food and fucking. My father said that when the few value our art the most, is when the many are the most hungry. He was right.”
 
 


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Comments

  1. Amazing post and Awesome review thank you for posting

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