Private Pleasures is like a scratched record – it gets stuck in a groove and the reader never gets to hear the rest of the song. Girl loves boy and wants to marry him. Boy can’t make a commitment so girl leaves. Boy tries to convince girl to stay with him anyway. Girl doesn’t want to come back but does for awhile. Girl loves boy and wants to marry him. Boy can’t make a commitment so girl leaves. And so on and so on, until the end, when the story finally jumps out of the groove and gets on with it.

Grey Nichols is a fabulously wealthy man with a horrible past – the only reason his father married his mother is because she was pregnant – with Grey. Since his father died, his mother has had a series of disastrous marriages, and, as a result, Grey has never known love. At least until interior decorator Mariah Stevens comes into his life. Unfortunately, she loves him but he doesn’t believe in love. He doesn’t believe in love, marriage, family, or children, and these are all things she wants with him. When he asks her to move into the mansion she’s just decorated for him – without benefit of marriage – Mariah realizes it’s time to cut her losses and move on.

But Grey can’t live without her, and so it begins, a series of scenes where Grey tries to win her back, fails, succeeds, fails, succeeds, and on and on and on. Intermingled with all this angst is some hot sex – these two beautiful and wealthy (Grey is loaded) people also make hot and passionate love together, and the love scenes do sizzle.

But 220 pages of the same stuff over and over again grates, because for every inch that their relationship (and Grey’s realization that he does love Mariah) moves forward, it retreats a half inch. Private Pleasures would have made a better anthology piece; in fact, had the author combined Private Pleasures with Private Fantasies, its sequel (about Jade, Mariah’s sister and decorating partner), a nice little 300 page book could have been published. But neither book stands on its own terribly well.