Talk Dirty To Me by Dakota Cassidy

Title: Talk Dirty to Me
Author: Dakota Cassidy
Series: Plum Orchard
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Published: 2014 by Harlequin MIRA
Source: Publisher via NetGalley eArc
Rating: ☕☕☕☕
 

Plum Orchard, Georgia, is about to get even juicier…

Notorious mean girl Dixie Davis is back in town and it's payback time. Literally. Dixie is flat broke and her best—make that only—friend, Landon, is throwing her a lifeline from the Great Beyond. Dixie stands to inherit his business…if she meets a few conditions:
She's got to live in Landon's mansion.
With her gorgeous ex-fiancé, Caine Donovan.
Who could also inherit the business.
Which is a phone sex empire.
Wait, what?
Landon's will lays it out: whoever gets the most new clients becomes the owner of Call Girls. Dixie has always been in it to win it, especially when it comes to Caine, who's made it clear he's not going down easy. (Oh, mercy.) Can Dixie really talk dirty and prove that she's cleaned up her act? Game on!

 

My Thoughts: This book took me an extraordinarily long time to read. The reason? The heroine was very difficult to like. She was a mean girl while in high school. Once out of high school she still bullied her way through life. Although this book started a decade after high school it was hard to see her as anything other than mean when every encounter or self musings was a reminder of her past. I find it hard to believe that someone can change so drastically from a horrible person to a kind one. At one point she had already claimed she had a change of heart in her early 20s but ended up the same horrible girl she was as a child. It wasn't until the last 1/4 of the book where I really jumped on the Dixie bandwagon and found I actually grew to like her.

In addition to the hard to like heroine, the book has so many pop culture references that it will not stand the test of time and the hero's "talent" for voices got to be annoying. Sure Jean-Luc Picard's voice may be identifiable as is Sean Connery's but talking like Darryl in The Walking Dead? Um ok.

What helped the book from being only average were the interesting secondary characters and the lovely message from the H/h's deceased best friend (via a DVD made prior to his death.) I found the last 1/4 of the book tied the book up very nicely and whetted my appetite for the next book in the series, which I had decided against reading during the first half but found by the end I changed my mind.