Charmed by the Bartender

By Piper Rayne, Piper Rayne, Inc., 2017, 268 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, March 17, 2022

I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret: Spicy romance novels are kind of fun.

Yeah, I know. But still.

I’d just finished Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” which disturbed me so much that I would have read the Cap’n Crunch box if it offered an emotional respite, and that was before Russia invaded Ukraine. So I went fishing and came up with Charmed by the Bartender, the first of the authors’ Modern Love trilogy. It won out because it was set in my hometown and the excerpt suggested the self-published authors knew where to put the commas. Also, it sounded like there was going to be a lot of hot sex, which is better than a cereal box when it comes to distractions.

Bonus: At 268 pages I’d be done in no time and gain some ground on my Goodreads reading challenge.

Bodice-rippers don’t get the respect they deserve. I checked on Goodreads, and at that very moment, there were 2,210 people reading this 5-year-old title, 4,493 people had it marked “Want to Read” and 5,917 people had rated it (it averaged 4.08 stars on a scale of five). At $14.99 for the paperback and $3.99 for the electronic book, the duo who write as Piper Rayne are doing OK for a week’s work.

I don’t want to offend anyone here, so I’ll warn you now that this review will contain some words you won’t want to share with the crowd at Thanksgiving unless you have a very, very hip set of in-laws. If the phrase “unicorn cock” makes you flinch, bail out now. You won’t want to read this book anyway.

The setup has Whitney Knight moving back to San Francisco after a layoff at a Sacramento newspaper, living with her grandparents, who raised her. She’s hanging out with her two best gal-pals, Tahlia, the prep-school, Stanford-educated, rich-and-proper, suit-wearing heir to her father’s sausage company (see, they have a sense of humor), and Lennon, the wild, tattoo-covered, consequences-be-damned, sexually free entrepreneur who owns a tattoo parlor but is trying to branch out into starting a sex toy company.

Whitney gets brave and finds herself a Tinder date she’s supposed to meet at a nearby bar. The Tinder date blows her off — meeting at a bar was too much trouble for him — but it works out. The bartender’s hot, available, and flirting. She gets drunk and wakes up at his place, unsure whether they had sex.

It takes a minute, but I register that I must be in bed. I can feel the pillow under my head, the blankets bunched up around my waist. I try to remember the last thing I was doing before waking with what feels like a ten-pound weight on my head. I feel like I’m Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner just dropped the safe on me.

Complications arise when we discover that the bartender, Cole, owns the bar. And a distillery. And is doing everything he can to avoid going into the family business as his brother did, no matter how much money’s involved. Further complications arise when we find out that Cole’s brother is also Tahlia’s fiancé, Chase.

We get a little of Tahlia and a little of Lennon and a lot of Whitney. Specifically, we get a lot of Whitney's interior monologue, which is sometimes funny, sometimes self-deprecating, and frequently focused on the sex she just had, the sex she’s having or the sex she wants to have.

The easy route is to poke fun at it. But the characters are likable. They have three dimensions and they’re funny. We empathize with Whitney’s angst when she wakes up in the wrong bed. We get her struggle when she realizes that Cole is the same guy who stood her up a few years before. Lennon and Tahlia are clearly secondary players, but we also get enough of their exploits to see how the three fit together in their ménage-à-friendship. The men? Well, mostly window dressing. Sexually objectified. Unrealistically gorgeous, smart, and well-to-do, a standard no mortal can achieve. But this is told from the heroine’s point of view, and from that perspective, he has a nice butt and a cute dimple.

There’s enough plot and characterization that Whitney and Cole don’t get around to their first sex scene until the book’s halfway point. Even then, Whitney struggles with what to do, kind of like people in real life when they’re drawn to a relationship that’s showing some red flags.

He releases my hands and cups my cheeks with his palms. I let my hands roam from his pecs to his strong back. His fingers weave through my hair making a tight fist. Cole’s teeth nip at my bottom lip before his tongue slides back into my waiting mouth.

Fireworks explode in my veins and the incessant throbbing between my legs demands to be sated. The kiss is so euphoric, Cole is throwing all the baggage I carry over the edge of this peak. If there was a bed and a mattress handy I’d allow him to strap me to the headboard and see what those lips can really do. No questions asked. No thoughts about the aftermath.

It gets a lot steamier after that. A lot steamier. And the scenes are explicit, so don’t leave your copy lying around next to this month’s Ranger Rick. The sex is all vanilla, though. One boy with one girl and the kinkiest notion afoot is taking one of Lennon’s sex toy prototypes for a test drive, so there isn’t anything that would get banned in Kansas.

Predictably, Whitney and Cole get together. There’s a misunderstanding and they break up. They figure it out and get back together. Tahlia and Lennon provide subplots. We get to know them, enough that I can imagine which one of the three I’d probably end up dating, the one I’d aspire to date and the one I wouldn’t associate with. But the interesting thing is that by the end of the third book (yep, read all three, right in a row) I’d been forced to reevaluate my perceptions. Great literature makes you think that way. And while no one will confuse these books for great literature, ever, they’re not quite the lightweight romcom bodice-rippers they pretend to be.

Besides, they beat the heck out of a cereal box.

Oh – wait! I promised. There’s a gag that runs through all three books about finding the man with the, um, equipment that’s just perfect for you, rare and unique and idyllic. The phrase was inspired by a mythical beast painted on the side of Lennon's van, and members of Piper Rayne’s fan club are known as unicorns. The phrase “unicorn cock” pops up (sorry) 10 or so times in the book, introduced in Chapter 7, in part, thusly:

Have you ridden a unicorn before, Whit?” Cole asks. If I weren’t so irritated with the man right now I’d almost call his smile playful, but since I am irritated I’m going to go ahead and describe it as provoking.

With a saccharine smile I respond. “I think I have. Hard to say really. It must not have been as memorable as you’d expect.

Ouch.