A 21ST CENTURY COURTESAN

Author: Eden Bradley ISBN: 9780553385571 4/2009 CONTEMPORARY/EROTIC Publisher: DELTA

She lives in a world of silk sheets, imported champagne, and endless erotic delight... Sensual, seductive, and discreet, Valentine Day is a high-class call girl, pampered and adored by her exclusive clientele. But Valentine has a secret. Always in control, she's never experienced true pleasure outside of her work. But all that is about to change.... Now the woman who's spent a decade pleasuring others is about to embark on an erotic journey of her own. It happens one night at the opera. Seated next to her is gorgeous, sophisticated Joshua Spencer. And when the two finally come together in the most tender and intense lovemaking Valentine's ever known, she's hooked. But, suddenly Valentine is questioning everything. Joshua has no idea what she does for a living. Can she risk everything—including her hard-earned freedom and one final, shattering secret—for one man? And would he still want her if he knew the truth?

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Eden Bradley sets her erotic romance, A 21st CENTURY COURTESAN in present day Los Angeles, where Valentine Day is a high class call girl—a modern geisha or courtesan. She’s educated, a world traveler, speaks several languages and owns a beautiful gated home in the Hollywood Hills. She’s been in the business for nearly ten years and has never questioned her choice of career before—that is, before she meets the gorgeous Joshua Spencer at the opera, an opera she was supposed to attend with a client who can’t make it at the last minute. He seems so perfect and even after he reveals some of his unsavory past, Valentine is finding it hard to believe that a normal person could love her if they know who she really is… what she really does. Or is Joshua really good enough to lift her out of her life?

Bradley certainly has cornered my market when it comes to cover-to-cover erotic heat! Even though the steam rolling off Valentine just keeps coming, that is usually one of her problems with dating “off the clock.” She can’t come without the cash, until Joshua. Just thinking about him has her in a full on melt down. Could it simply be that he’s the only man who’s tried seducing her instead of the other way around? As I read further, I found myself wondering if Josh is real. Can he be? Even after Valentine has quit the biz and revealed herself to him, he hangs in there. I shook my head and remembered he is a fictional character. But could a real man be that good, that understanding, that circumspect? I sure hope so, but… Valentine has a lot to work through. Not just that she was a glorified hooker, but why she felt this was a career to begin with; why she was able to play the role so easily; and what part her parents had to play in how she saw herself.

Perhaps one of the most telling lines in the story comes on the third page of the book when Valentine explains how she does what she does and, in essence it is what Bradley does as well. She says that she learned in her English Lit class that it is the job of the author (and for her as a courtesan) to create a reality for the reader (or her client) where they are able to suspend disbelief long enough for the unusual to become a world that they can buy into. And they both do it marvelously. I could sincerely feel Valentine’s fears, and frustration. When her madam tells her that she’ll never really be able to leave the life of a call girl behind her, and then she meets one of her former clients in an awkward moment, I feel the trap closing in around me. This story showcases the beauty of sex and love, and I felt compelled to listen to Rachmaninov, one of the great romantic composers, while I was reading it.

If you read A 21st CENTURY COURTESAN for nothing but the mind blowing sex, you will be utterly satisfied; but the deeper satisfaction comes from Valentine’s choices and learning that we all have the ability to choose at any moment to be different from our past, or where we thought we were headed in the future. This power to accept who we are and to change when we see a better way is the best part of being human, and Eden Bradley exposes these truths in a raw, vulnerable way that make them accessible to the reader.

Susan Barton