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This one also gets an extra half-star, because the setting was fun. Think The Mummy, or The Book of True Desires.

Isabella is investigating the tomb that her husband had been obsessed with before his death, when she's separated from her companion and encounters Jake, an American tomb robber. They start out trying to find a way out, but keep being overcome by lust, obviously an ancient curse.

Sadly, the ancient curse sounds like it was written by a hormone-crazed teenage boy, because it mostly takes the form of voyeurism and exhibitionism of masturbation. I'm not sure if my distaste stems from the fact that it's not my fantasy, or if it really did have that juvenile ooh-this-is-naughty tone to it.

The icing on the cake was ****spoiler**** that the curse was against sex without love, and that our heroes were safe because it was True Love between Jake and Isabella after a couple of hours and a half-dozen or so orgasms. **** Please.

Oh, thank goodness there's an Angela Knight story. This makes the whole book worth buying.

Chloe's long-time boyfriend has just married her newly-divorced friend, and she's not in the mood for romance, to put it mildly. Then a package is delivered, containing a life-sized portrait of a sleeping, naked knight.

The knight portrait is Radolf, and he comes to Chloe in steamy dreams, which she enjoys until she discovers that he's real and cursed to eternal sleep, feeding the witch who cursed him with mortals' passion, and that he needs her to awaken and save him.

I'm not going to spoil it, but the solution is cute and clever. And of course Angela Knight is one of the best at writing sex scenes that are both erotic and fit the story.

College intern Georgie gets lost in the Congo and is rescued by a modern-day Tarzan (Mark) who's never seen a woman before. Despite that, he's a pro at foreplay. She helps him remember how to talk; he teaches her about sex.

It gets a little more far-fetched when they get "rescued," with a strange interlude with a native tribe, and then when Mark is reintroduced to civilization.

It's a cute story, but required too much suspension of disbelief for me.

Dani is wanted for stealing computer codes, and Reno is the FBI agent on her trail. Think The Fugitive. She's innocent, but is on the run until she can prove it. She and Reno have been emailing each other during their chase and have formed a connection.

It's a fun, exciting story, but again, there were some things I just couldn't buy. And the scene where Dani ****spoiler**** gives Reno a lap-dance when she's working as a stripper to get some quick cash and neither of them recognized the other **** just seemed gratuitous and hard to believe.

Quick giggle: this story starts with the sentence "I want your daughter." We just watched The Blues Brothers, and I flashed on the scene with John Belushi in the restaurant.

Nicholas is no longer a gangster, but he's got a very dangerous enemy, so he's come to terms with the fact that he can never have a long-term relationship because anyone he might be close to would become a target. So he has a series of short affairs.

Isabelle is different--Nicholas actually feels something for her. He tries to stay away, but when she's mugged, he rescues her, stays with her until she's healed, then takes her to his secluded hideout, fully expecting to give her up after 2 weeks.

It's a very sweet story, but I really questioned the premise. There didn't seem to be any danger when he was staying at her house, and then at the end, when ****spoiler**** the bad guy was killed, it made no sense that they'd have to go into hiding at that point****.

Journalist Chloe has been "invited" on a cruise on a yacht, the Fantasy. Her boss essentially told her to go or lose her job, but she has no idea why, as the yacht's mysterious owner "doesn't do interviews." The plot thickens when she discovers two ex-lovers on the cruise, with orders not to talk to her about why they're there.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story--figuring out what was going on, and just who was supposed to be the hero. I'm a big sucker for intrigue. And there was some pretty steamy sex.

But the hero was a pretty major stalker, which spoiled some of my enjoyment of the story. If he'd even talked to her before, I'd have been fine with it.

*blinks* Well. That surprised me. My least favorite story of all 8 in this omnibus, and most of the Amazon reviewers cited this as the best story. How very odd.

I guess the story itself is pretty entertaining--private eye Nikki specializes in catching cheating husbands, and between that and her mother's past, she has a low opinion of men and of relationships. But a mysterious man keeps running into her, and there is a pretty clever misunderstanding-type plot between them.

However. I absolutely could not get past the writing. I wanted to take the author's (or the editor's--I'm not picky) thesaurus away and bury it. Seriously purple prose, and some misused words that set my teeth on edge (the heroine thinking that "her body was scintillating after a night of vivid dreams"? I don't think so.)

This was a sexy Regency romance. Lady Jane's guardian has arranged a marriage for her with and old, thrice-widowed man, and she, quite sensibly, IMO, has run off. The guardian asks his younger brother Havyn, who remembers Jane as a teenager with spots (zits, for those of you unacquainted with Regency lingo), to go find her.

He does find her, and she's definitely improved with age. What's more, she begs him to "ruin" her so she won't have to marry the old man.

It's a nice story, particularly if you enjoy the Regency period--it's just a little predictable, also particularly if you enjoy the Regency period. The sex scenes were quite sensual, even though I found the Kama Sutra references to be a little self-conscious.

Wow. This novella pushed every one of my buttons: spies, and friends turning into lovers, plus a hefty emotional punch. It was well-written, and I was on pins and needles through the entire story.

And of course, the Amazon reviewers hated it. I'm seeing a trend.

Lily is a spy, and her mission is to infiltrate a terrorist camp as a sex slave, make contact with a double agent, and through him get close enough to the leader to plant a tracking device on his skin.

Seth is the agent in control of the mission, which he's leading via video feeds back at headquarters. Both Seth and Lily have a thing for each other, but due to their positions, neither has acted on it.

The story alternates chapters between Seth and Lily, keeping track of the mission time, which adds tension. Lily's chapters are in first person and are very deep POV, which is very affecting. Even though Seth's chapters are in third person, his emotional turmoil as he's forced to watch from a distance as the woman he's realized he's in love with has sex with another man is vividly clear.

"Code Name: Kiss" is emotionally wrenching, and better yet, the sex is an integral part of the story.

I was surprised to see in the "about the author" that Jeanie Cesarini = Jeanie London. I guess I'm going to take those recommendations for Jeanie London's books seriously now.

Anastasia is about to become a nun, but she has definite ideas about those vows. She believes that for the vows to truly be meaningful, she has to know what she's giving up. For example, she was raised in a wealthy family, so taking a vow of poverty has meaning. However, she has no knowledge of carnal pleasures, so taking a vow of chastity is, to her mind, meaningless.

It's Christmas Eve, and Trudy Maxwell has to find a Major MacGuffin for her nephew... which cracked me up every time I read it, because I know why it was called that. In the very last toy store, she finds last year's model and an ex-boyfriend, and ends up involved in a dangerous game of espionage. It's short, but Crusie makes it work.

The fact that Trudy and Nolan had already started falling in love helped, as did the ending. But mostly it's the fact that, in typical Crusie fashion, she made every word count.

Meh. Maggie and Eric have both loved each other from afar for years, and now that her father has died and left the company to Maggie instead of Eric, and she's now his boss, any potential relationship appears to be doomed, until Maggie decides to take matters into her own hands.

The unrequited love helps with the length, but I had trouble with 1) her father just died, but all she can think about is how hawt Eric is, 2) her father knew she had the hots for Eric, so he left her the company to give her a chance with him (???), and 3) she's The Best Boss Evah, but what she really wants is something else. Just too much to swallow for me.

Antonia has had the hots for her boss for a while, and now that she'll be moving to another office, the annual Christmas party is the perfect chance to seduce him. Except that when she starts kissing him, she discovers it's his twin brother Max. And she's even hotter for him.

This is one of those "romances" in which hot sex = love. And to top it off, there's the dreaded trust issue and Big Misunderstanding. After a one-night stand. Shoot me now.

This was the best of the bunch, I thought. Harriet thinks she's been hired as a personal assistant to American actress Rowena, but she was actually hired as a catalyst to upset the sex/romance triangle between Rowena, her director husband Lewis, and her brother Chris.

Lewis proposed the experiment with a two-fold purpose: to use the presence of another woman to break up the incestual relationship between Rowena and Chris; and to plot out the course of what he expects to be his finest film.

Harriet is the only one not in on the scheme, and it's soon apparent that she's the wild card, and she affects them all in ways they hadn't predicted.

There's plenty of sex, of course, but there's also a lot of emotional and plot content to it. The incest was icky, but as it was consensual and not coerced at all, it could have been worse. I wasn't sure about the need for the bit about making a movie at first, but it provided a good framework and reason for both Lewis and Rowena to stick with the charade even when things started to get sticky.

This one, I didn't like. Half-sisters Louise and Gina are reunited after a 10-year estrangement when Louise leaves her husband and, having nowhere to go, asks Gina if she can stay for a while.

Turns out that Gina's lucrative job is as an exotic dancer and sometime prostitute, and she lives with her lover Ahmed, who owns the club where she's the headliner.

You can see where this is going, right? Louise decides to dance to earn the money she needs. It takes her a whole weekend to become great at it. There's a lot of what seems like juvenile snickering going on--oooh, she showed her boobs!

Near the end, there's an attempt at a role reversal, which could have been good, if I'd cared about either of the sisters. I didn't. They were both unpleasant and self-righteous (if that term can be applied to a person who looks down on someone who's reluctant to join in a sex-and-drug orgy), and the only interesting character was ex-porn star Rick who was trying to make a new life for himself, and who had far too small a role in this story.

This one also starts with a woman, Eleanor, leaving her husband, and needing money. Eleanor is a non-fiction writer, and her agent's latest project is for her to work with sex researcher Marcus Grant on a book about awakening a woman's sexuality.

She is, of course, resistant--in large part because she feels her low libido caused her husband to "turn gay." She's persuaded to collaborate, but only if she can test out his theories on herself, because she's planning to prove him wrong, though subconsciously hoping he's right.

Marcus's theory is that by exploring various facets of sexuality, a woman will learn what turns her on, and she'll become more sexual. His list of facets is pretty simplistic: massage, pornography, exhibitionism/voyeurism, lesbian experiences, and S&M; and Eleanor's response to the tasks was almost unbelievably naive.

Still, the story was saved because of the non-sex aspects. The collaboration and experiment have consequences neither of them anticipated, both emotional and sexual.