Notorious by Leslie McAdam

ARC Review

“You can’t drown sorrows. They swim.”

🤍 Song to set the mood🤍

Not suitable for anyone under 18 years of age.
Check trigger warnings.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
🌶️🌶️🌶️

Blurb

Picking up your favorite adult film star at a bar in Vegas is a bad idea—especially when you wake up the next morning married to him. Ask me how I know.

Before I met Velvet the Cowboy, the public knew me as an innocuous guy who was running for office.

Now I’ve gone from boring to notorious in twenty-four hours.

The hot stranger’s ring on my finger puts a damper on my political ambitions, since his day job isn’t voter-friendly. An annulment is a no-go, and a quickie divorce would make me look unreliable.

In any case, when I find out Velvet’s dark plans, I know I can’t let him out of my sight. Which means I’m taking a gorgeous, 6’6”, slow-talking cowboy home with me to protect him from himself.

Being with him might light my career on fire. I’m just not expecting it to do the same to my heart.

Notorious is a stand-alone contemporary romance about Johnny Haskell, a cowboy turned adult star who stops to pet every good dog (and they’re all good dogs), and Kurt Delmont, a senatorial candidate who wants to save the world. It features recovery from a mental health crisis, healing from old wounds, and love that takes these two by surprise. This book contains sensitive themes; a detailed description of the contents is in the author’s note in the book preview. Happily ever after guaranteed.

Expected publication June 6, 2024

What to expect:

❥ Dual POV ❥ MM Romance
❥ Pornstar x Politician ❥ Accidental Married
❥ Mental Health Rep ❥ Trauma ❥ Hurt/Comfort
❥ Praise Kink ❥ Swooning ❥ ‘Pretty Woman’ Vibe

Review

I highly recommend taking a look at the trigger warnings before reading this book.

A pornstar and a politician walks into a bar…. and they end up getting married in Vegas.

This was such an emotional read right from the start, very much focused on mental health and the road to getting better.

Johnny is such a sweet soul, who’s been through so much during his life, and it’s no wonder that his demons started to catch up with him. While this book being a romance, it still manages to not overly romanticize Johnny’s mental health problems. He didn’t just meet a man and everything was magically fixed and forgotten. He met a man who decided that Johnny was worth fighting for and with. And the fight was not an easy one. It had all the ups and downs.

Kurt… ask me to describe a walking green flag, and I’ll give you Kurt. He got a lot of things going on in his own life, but he is willing to drop it all to help Johnny.

Your life is more important than some abstract concept I can barely articulate

I totally got Pretty Woman vibes at first, the way Kurt wants to spoil Johnny, and it was actually really cute. Like, his intentions were just so pure, and not in a “I want to change you” kind of way, just in a “I really want to make you happy” kind of way. Like with the puppy…

I also teared up every time he made Johnny promise to stay alive for another day. My poor heart.

“Can you please promise me you’ll stay alive for the next twenty-four hours?”

Ask me to describe a walking green flag, and I’ll give you Kurt… but I’ll conveniently keep quiet about his little trip to the dark side when he’s seeking vengeance for Johnny. (I’m definitely looking forward to the book about the characters involved in this scene).

This book also got my favorite kind of kink! The way Johnny praises Kurt made me weeeaaaak. Damn 🫠

“Be a good boy and get down on your knees.“

So yea, this book made me sob, swoon and weak at the knees ♥