Review: ★Genie★ by Kitty French

The queen of the sex scene is back. USA Today bestselling author Kitty French gave you Lucien Knight in the smash hit Knight Trilogy, and she returns now with a brand new, smokin’ hot story.
One complete story. No cliffhanger. Hold onto your corset strings, we’re going burlesque!

Feathers. Lies. Glitter. Secrets. Lust.
Meet Genie Divine, the wise-cracking London show-girl on a hell-bent mission to save her beloved family theatre.

Now meet Abel Kingdom, the australian gym mogul determined to buy it out from underneath her.

On paper they have nothing in common, and when they meet, they have even less.

The only thing they DO have is chemistry.

Undeniable, rip-my-clothes-off-and-do-me-now-against-the-wall chemistry.

He wants her theatre. She wants him dead.

The stage is set for an explosive summer…

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I don’t like him, he doesn’t like me, and then every now and then we meet in the middle and rip each other’s clothes off.

I adore Kitty French and there is no other trope I love more than the hate-to-love. So this book should have been a guaranteed winner for me, right? And right up until the halfway mark it really was. But I’ll get to that in a bit…

Abel is in London for a business transaction and nothing else. He’s there to watch the infamous Burlesque performance of the debilitated club he plans on buying and reinventing as part of his chain of gyms. He’s not a plan to pay fair and he’s also a man who has a past that made sure that his hate for anything he views as a woman essentially whoring herself out as deplorable. He doesn’t care if it’s a stripper, and a gorgeous burlesque dancer is no better. But then the redhaired beauty on stage gyrating against a genie lamp manages to completely enrapture him…or at least one part of his anatomy.

She looked like a girl who smoked cigarettes and bathed in champagne, who knew every dirty word in the dictionary and a few more besides.

Genie Devine doesn’t know that her uncle’s club that she’s fallen in love with over the years is in financial trouble. She’s also less than pleased to find the moody man that wants to buy it out right from under them. She’s determined to do everything to save the place, even if she has to use her feminine charms to do it…

She wanted to make him come so hard his knees would buckle, yet at the same time she wanted to clamp her hands around his throat and stop his breath.

Abel is definitely a man that makes his presence known and his opinion even more so.

Now if you follow my reviews or know me that you know that I love me my assholes. And boy did Abel fit that to a T. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to jock punch him or lick him most of the time. Luckily his internal struggle managed to keep him well balanced on that line between pure asshole and redeemingly broken

He didn’t want to want that woman, that dangerously powerful, knowing siren. He didn’t want to want Genie Divine at all.

I also love a hot angry sex scene, and of course Kitty French knows how to write one hell of a sex scene. You also begin to get small tidbits about what makes Abel tick and why he has so much hate towards the club and what he believes Genie does. His internal struggle was evident

She stirred memories in him he’d rather keep buried, and she stirred emotions in him that left him feeling betrayed even by his own body. Right at that moment his head hated her, his cock loved her, and his heart was plain confused.

But then he’d go and slap you over the head with his asshole tendencies and I’d find myself forgetting that I should feel bad for him.

You’re a woman, I’m a man. You want to tempt me into fucking you? Go ahead. Throw yourself at me. But know this. I’ll fuck you and then I’ll fuck you over.

Unfortunately, this is exactly where the story began to lose me. This never ending back and forth between Genie and Abel began to quickly wear me down. Abel was just plain cruel to her at times, and I thought Genie was way too understanding and forgiving with him. Now don’t get me wrong, she was NOT a doormat in any sense of the word. She was super kind, understanding and sweet. But then I began to think she was too good for Abel. I get that he has his demons, but I needed the man to grovel. G-R-O-V-E-L. And while he finally gets his shit together at the end it was too little too late for me. Maybe if he got his head out of his ass a little sooner and actually worked to get Genie to forgive his treatment of her throughout the entire book, I could have connected to their HEA more. As it was, it just seemed too sudden. While I didn’t fully love this one, I wouldn’t even think twice about picking up another book by this author. Whatever fault I may have found that caused me to not enjoy this one as much, it was still sexy and I loved the first part of the book and the epilogue was wonderful.