Blog Tour: Best Friends with Benefits by Candy Sloane (Excerpt, Review, Giveaway)
Best Friends with Benefits
By: Candy Sloane
Releasing March 14th 2016
Entangled Brazen
Book Excerpt
Valerie Barkin and Alec Rogers survived bullies, awful parents, and seriously shitty social standing the only way best friends can—together. But with the unexpected sexual tension suddenly flaring between them, surviving their ten-year high school reunion might be a different story…
Val hasn’t changed. She still feels like the stringy-haired band geek the popular kids teased, but Alec has definitely changed. He’s now the front man for the Grammy-winning rock band Chronic Disharmony, with the sexual reputation to match. And he’s more than willing to help Val rock the reunion.
And then it happens—a drunken game of Seven Minutes in Heaven—and their fourteen-years-long foreplay comes crashing to the forefront…changing everything.
Seven minutes turns into a weekend of mind-blowing, no-strings-attached sex. But these best friends won’t be able to leave their hearts out of it forever, not when the most meaningful benefit could change their relationship for good….
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Book Excerpt
From Best Friends with Benefits by Candy Sloane:
He shouldn’t want this. She was his best friend. But he couldn’t stop.
Even in the dark, he could sense her curves. Ample breasts just begging for a skimpy tank top, her ass plump in that tight little skirt and insistent for a strong squeeze, or a smack if she was being naughty.
The way her gaze locked and her breath met the speed of his own as he erased the last bit of space between them, he was sure she was naughty. Very naughty. That she would welcome the palm of his hand.
And just like that, his best friend had made him hard.
“I don’t hear anything in there,” Randy Tines yelled from outside the door.
“I think we’re supposed to be kissing,” Alec said, his cock so rigid he thought she could feel it through his pants.
“You mean each other?”
“We could just make kissing noises,” he suggested, thinking of his lips teasing along the inside of her collar, biting off button after button of her shirt and spitting them out like watermelon seeds.
Hell yeah, he wanted to kiss her, her lips and her neck and the little spot behind her knee that she had been kneading as they drove here. He knew it was crazy, he knew it was wrong, but he wanted to be the guy to fuck Mr. Peanut out of her.
“Like this?” She pressed her hand to her lips and pretended to make out with it, her eyes on him as her tongue slicked over her skin.
His stomach rumbled in pure sexual hunger. One thing was for sure—all that flute practice had been good for a lot more than music.
“That sounds completely fake,” he scoffed. Though considering the way his cock fought against the fabric of his pants, that was not entirely true.
Her bottom lip lay open against the inside of her palm.
“You think you could do better?”
He yanked her hand to his lips before she could protest, before he could consider. He kissed it lightly at first, soft and drugging, slid the tip of his tongue up to her wrist, until he hit the buttoned cuff. “Maybe it should be me.” The words spilled out against the soft-as-sin fabric.
“What?”
“Maybe I should be the one to fuck you like you deserve.”
Val didn’t reply, just breathed out more peppermint, hot peppermint against the skin of his face. Her eyes smoldered with want. It was clear she felt it, too, the heat between them, the confusing, beautiful, delicious heat.
He grabbed her forearm and drew her closer, slanting in to her chest. The shock of their bodies against each other caused them both to freeze. Not even a breath passed between them, but he knew exactly what he needed to do.
He clenched the back of her head, and his lips dipped to her neck, dripping down her skin like melting ice. Fuck, he had to taste her. He opened his mouth, and his tongue lapped at her tender skin.
“Alec,” she breathed.
“Follow my lead.” He couldn’t stop, though she certainly didn’t seem like she was asking him to. If anything, she was yielding to him. He trailed a finger down the center of her neck, playing with the top button of her shirt, pausing so he could think. Ten years. He could have gone to see her so many times. He hadn’t at first because of how they’d left things after graduation, and then because their careers got in the way and they had both gotten into the routine of being like pen pals, but maybe he had really been avoiding their attraction.
There was no avoiding it now. There was no thinking.
She needed this, and he was going to give it to her.
My Thoughts
*ARC provided by Publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review*
Best friends. A high school reunion. Fourteen years of foreplay. A sexy, loves-to-wear-all-black rock musician. A woman-who-plays-in-an-orchestra-and-lacks-belief-in-herself. Basically, this book has everything you need in a friends to lovers, high school reunion romance…and then some.
I loved this book! Not only was it well-written, but it captured my attention right away, pulling me into the story and into the plight of the characters. Alec and Valerie were truly compelling individuals in their own right and I immediately identified with each of them.
Both characters in this story were well-rounded, with true psychological depth and heartfelt pent-up passion. I believed in their story, and I loved their journey to finding the foundation they needed to make their relationship work.
Sure, I wanted to shake Val a few times and get her to see how flawed her thinking was, but at the same time, it was all too easy to understand exactly where she was coming from and how hard it was for her to break those toxic thought patterns from high school. Of course, Alec had his own leftover issues to deal with, but whereas Valerie’s issues where wrapped up in her own self-image and the mean-kid mentality of her high school peers, Alec’s stemmed from a place much closer to him—his parents, and his own belief that he isn’t’ good enough for her.
This book was a fun, sexy read that I loved a lot. Both story and characters were handled well, as were the fun, flirty moments, the hot, sexy love scenes, and the angst scenes that had one of the best confrontation exchanged I’ve read in a while.
Absolutely loved it.
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Giveaway
Up for Grabs: $25 Amazon eGift Card
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About the Author
Candy Sloane is a pseudonym for a Young Adult & New Adult author who needed to write some naughty books her mother couldn’t read. She lives in Portland, OR and loves Lifetime movies. She would tell you more, but this persona is a secret.
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