“After the Night” by Linda Howard

It is an understatement to say that Lola, Mimi and I had a rough week here at ripmybodice.com. Monday started off well enough, with us warding away the Monday blues by lying helplessly by our rooftop pool while Juan supplies us with an endless amount of frozen strawberry margs while rubbing lotion on our backs to prevent our delicate skins from burning but then, it all went rather terribly wrong by Wednesday when Juan declared that he had to attend to some “family emergency” and did not know when he would be back. Something about a half brother he needs to save from…alright I admit by this time none of us were paying any attention to Juan although he was wearing his usual Wednesday pink spandex shorts; time kind of stopped when he said “I must go away for little while”. Lola coped with her loss by hitting the bottle while watching a marathon of scary movies, Mimi coped with her loss by hitting the bottle while surfing the net to discover new ways of exterminating cockroaches from the face of the earth, and I locked myself in our in-house Library of Love to read “After the Night” by Linda Howard, sober. Oh alright alright! I had a drink in one hand as well. What? Oh fine. I was nursing a bottle of tequila too okay? You happy now?!

As a comfort read, “After the Night” was pretty darn good. As Lola put it when she recommended the book to me, it’s about a trailer trash girl, who is in love with boy. Boy, blue blood very rich, old money, very good looking. Boy threw girl and family off his property and out of the town of Prescott. Girl comes back, boy wants girl. Now go away because this is when the sharks grow human legs and attack the town-folk.” To which, my actual words were “oOhh. Nice”, referring to the book of course, followed by “I hope the girl isn’t too annoying because I’m so sick of annoying heroines” and then “damn I’ve run out of vodka can I have your tequila?” And then Lola threw me out of her office for still being there. Bah.

Grayson Rouillard is the hero of the book, and somewhat of a golden child of the town of Prescott which is practically essentially owned by the Rouillard family because they are that old school and that rich. Faith Devlin is the youngest daughter of the Devlin brood who lives in a little trailer on the Rouillard property (from what I gather or…it could be the town since the town IS Rouillard property but whatever), whose father is a constant drunk who can’t pee in the toilet to save his life, two older brothers who are thievin’ stealin’ wild drunks, mother who is The Established Village Bicycle, and whose older sister is also, for some reason in the same village bicycle race as their mother. Oh and she has a younger brother who is retarded and born with a weak heart. So basically, life is sh*t for our heroine Faith, the neat, tidy, clean bookworm of the family, tortured by her love for Grayson (talk about dreaming for the impossible dream). I was however slightly perturbed to read at one point, about Faith hiding in the bushes or …some part of the summerhouse or whatever, while watching her dream man Grayson do the boinky boinky with another girl and young voyeur Faith was oh I think maybe elevenish or fourteenish at the time? Well whatever her age was, she was definitely way younger than any acceptable age for a girl to be noticing that Grayson had two dimples on his butt cheeks and that he had a dark curly hair behind his thighs and she was definitely definately too damn young to be wishing she saw his front. But I digress. Faith’s mama The Established Village Bicycle is mistress to Gray’s daddy so naturally, the Rouillard and the Devlins are not happy families that invite each other over for family barbecues and when Gray’s daddy and Faith’s mama mysteriously disappear one night, it is naturally assumed that the pair have eloped. Gray’s family does not take the news well and Gray goes into a mad rage (I love it when they get angry) and decides to throw the Devlins out of Prescott in the middle of the night.

This is where it gets a little disturbing because well, okay so we have Gray and a bunch of cops in their cars, surrounding the little trailer in the dark of night, giving the Devlins five minutes to get out of Prescott. Faith, the only normal one of the bunch is frantically running around trying to grab whatever stuff she can since they haven’t packed and it ain’t looking like anybody is going to give them time to bubble wrap any of their prized possessions so she’s running around in her nightgown grabbing stuff and shoving it into the back of the trunk while the cops and Gray look on, aroused. Yes you heard me. Faith is maybe fourteen at this point? She’s in her hand-me down nightgown all see throughy because of the headlights from the cars and every male in the vicinity is ogling her not yet fully developed boobies and ass. And Gray gets a little stirring in his pants. Uhm…I don’t even know what to say other than I really wished Linda Howard could have spared us that. I’m sure there’s another way to prove the point that a) Faith will turn out to be a man-killer in the future; and b) Gray finds Faith hot. Really.

Fast forward to twelve years later, Faith comes back to town to find her roots and Gray throws her out again but this time, thankfully his attraction to her is less of a “eeww gross what is wrong with you?!” and more of a “oooh hot”. Faith and Gray go through the whole sexual chemistry tension thing, foreplay disguised as witty dialogue, jealousy, longing etc etc. Very Romeo & Juliet-esque with their “our families hate each other but I still wanna boink you” except Gray’s like “look if you move out of this town, my family won’t know that you are still here and they won’t be hurt by you when they see you because you look so much like that adulterating bitch of your mother who ran away with my father and we can still boink!” and Faith’s like “dude I’m not going anywhere” and Gray’s like “but I wanna boink! With you!” and Faith’s like “I’ve always loved you but you called me trash that night when you were inappropriate ogling my very very young-self” and Gray’s like “Uhmm yes, but I’m very proud of who you are now and what you have become and…I want to boink with you! Really!” and Faith’s like “You’re proud of me?! *sniffle* okay!”

And so, they boink. In the woods, in the toilet of the courthouse, at her house many times, and then her house burned down. Well not exactly because of the boinking although I must say their sex scenes were pretty hot but the house burning thing is more related to the whodunit murder mystery thriller plot of the book which I quite enjoyed as well. Gray is one of those really nice Alpha Males; the kind you take home to mother (as opposed to Ivan Tramore who would probably murder dear mommy if he thought that that would make you more dependent on him. Seriously, how do you not love a man with that kind of single-minded determination to make you his?) except, you probably have to help him come up with a better excuse of why his hair remains uncut other than “the sound of a buzzing razor gives me the willies”.

So if you’re Juan-less like we are this week, I highly recommend “After the Night” by Linda Howard and Grayson’s butt dimples to you this weekend. Just, watch out of the “ewww” moments in the book, of which there are a few. In the meantime, say a little prayer for us the Juan-less three.