In the early days of the Blaze line, the publisher’s guidelines stated that the books needed to have a “sexy premise.” The problem was that not only were many of these supposedly “sexy premises” forced and lame, but having one didn’t necessarily result in a sexy story. Mara Fox’s Letting Loose! suffers from an even bigger problem. It has a “sexy premise” – but no story whatsoever. The latest in the long-running The Wrong Bed miniseries, it begins with the usual gimmick of a character expecting to end up in bed with one person and winding up with another. What happens after that? A whole lotta nothing.

We first meet Tina Henderson when she’s sitting in a coed sauna with her best friend Emma. A hot guy comes in and Tina begins to make eyes at him. Then his girlfriend comes in and sits down next to him. So what does Tina do? Why, she continues to flirt with him, writhing around to show off her body while his girlfriend is sitting right there. When Emma calls her on it, Tina says, “What does she expect? She should go work out. Why should I sweat at the gym, and then hide my body just to make her feel good?” There’s bold and sassy, and then there’s classless and tacky, and Tina belonged firmly in the latter category as far as I was concerned.

My opinion was hardly improved when, two pages later, Emma, who’s getting married, makes Tina promise not to hire a stripper for her bachelorette party. Tina, who just a few paragraphs earlier was thinking how “Emma mattered to her,” promises. But you see, she has her fingers crossed, so it doesn’t count! How clever! Except not. I mean, honestly, how many adults act like that? Tina is supposedly a cutthroat attorney, so I knew she had to be more than ten years old. It would have been nice if she’d started acting like it.

The reason Tina wants to hire the stripper known as The Bandit has nothing to do with Emma. Tina just wants to sleep with him. She doesn’t believe in relationships, and her recent fling with attorney Tyler Walden has gotten a little too serious for her tastes. So she wants to hit the sheets with The Bandit to get Tyler out of her system. Tina decides, “While she’d never paid for sex before, she didn’t think a stripper would protest too much.” I couldn’t figure out if that was typical Harlequin-style moralizing (Strippers are nothing but dirty, dirty whores!) or just another sign that Tina was self-involved and clueless. Either way, the fact that she would assume an exotic dancer is pretty much the same thing as a prostitute lowered my opinion even further.

Of course, Tina hires The Bandit, which predictably ticks off Emma at her own party (nice way to treat someone who supposedly matters to you, huh?). Tyler is also at the party, and when he sees the way Tina looks at the stripper, he gives The Bandit a thousand bucks for his costume so that he can switch places with the man. Then, when Tina comes for him, Tyler whisks her up to a hotel room for a night of hot sex. The next morning, she finds out and is predictably angry.

So where does the story go now that the “sexy premise” is out of the way? Nowhere. Slowly. The reason Tina doesn’t believe in relationships is because she grew up in foster homes where everyone was mean to each other, and everything she saw taught her that couples never last. It’s the kind of obvious conflict whose resolution is predictable. This is a romance novel, so we know Tyler’s not going to decide she’s right and relationships never work, with them going their separate ways in the end. No, clearly Tina will come around and decide relationships can work and she and Tyler can have a future. Just as clearly, this won’t happen until the end, since that conflict is the only thing keeping the book going and otherwise it would be over too soon.

Such an obvious conflict can work. After all, what makes a romance novel work is the journey, not the destination. It’s how they get to their happy ending, not the fact that they do. Unfortunately, in this case the journey is boring as hell. There aren’t enough interesting things happening for this to work as a plot-driven story, and the characters are too shallow for it to work as a character-driven one. She’s immature and annoying, while he’s just dull. He keeps following her around trying to convince her to give them a chance. They play with some dogs. They have sex on a beach. He gets involved with her work with abused women. None of it is remotely interesting, and it feels like the author is just throwing a lot of filler in as she tries to delay Tina’s inevitable change of heart. Meanwhile, Tina’s feelings are never explored with enough depth to make them sympathetic or compelling. The way she constantly falls back on what she learned in the foster homes just seems repetitive. There’s not nearly enough of an evolution of her feelings leading up to the ending, where I suspected I should have been touched, and wasn’t.

Letting Loose! is a 243 page book that felt twice as long, and I don’t mean that in a good way. If the author had given as much thought to what happened after the characters had their “wrong bed” encounter, the book might have better. Then again, with a heroine this annoying and a hero this drab, it still would have been a long way from being good.