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    The Flirt
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    The Flirt
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    The Flirt
    Ebook423 pages5 hours

    The Flirt

    By Kathleen Tessaro

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Perfume Collector comes this charming, witty novel about a “professional” flirt.

    “Unique situation for an attractive, well-mannered, morally flexible young man. Hours irregular. Pay generous. Discretion a must…”

    When struggling, out-of-work actor, Hughie Venables-Smythe sees the mysterious job description in the classifieds, he’s convinced he’s found his destiny. For, though he’s become accustomed to running out of credit on his cell phone, sleeping on his sister’s sofa, and begging the waitress at the local café to let him slide yet again on his bill, he longs to treat his lover—the sexy, sophisticated, and amorously ruthless lingerie designer, Leticia Vane, to the finer things in life. But how is he to win her heart if he can’t even pay for dinner? When he learns that his lucrative new position means flirting with married women who have been neglected by their spouses, he can’t believe his luck.

    Soon initiated into the extraordinary secret fraternity of the Professional Flirt, Hughie promises to have an exceptional career ahead of him. However, the life of a Flirt is a curiously lonely calling and there’s one absolute rule his new employer has: he must remain single. Only—how can he live without the delicious Leticia Vane?

    Surely, there’s nothing wrong with using a few of his newly polished romantic skills on the side to quietly seduce the woman he loves . . . is there?

    As clueless as he is handsome, Hughie gamely decides to throw his already complicated life into utter chaos . . . and discovers exactly why a Flirt’s professional and personal life should never mix.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 17, 2009
    ISBN9780061865732
    Unavailable
    The Flirt
    Author

    Kathleen Tessaro

    Kathleen Tessaro is the author of Elegance, Innocence, The Flirt, The Debutante, and The Perfume Collector. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband and son. www.kathleentessaro.com

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    Reviews for The Flirt

    3.5/5

    70 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      So I was messing about in my home library (something I do a lot) and I decided that I would organize my collecting a little. I would collect an author from each letter of the alphabet. I don't know why but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had started out pretty well: Jean Auel, R. M. Ballantyne, Tom Clancy, E. L. Doctorow, Samir El-Youssef, Jeffry Farnol, Elizabeth George, James Norman Hall, etc, in fact I'm well on the way to two alphabet's worth and you can see my reading is all over the genre map. But - I didn't have anything suitable on the shelves or in mind for the letter "T". So I fished around on the internet one night and found a site called "Fantastic Fiction". I scrolled around the listings for "T" and found a name I thought looked good in print. It was in the "mainstream" category and checked I it out. Kathleen Tessaro had written three books and collecting them shouldn't be a hardship - and the author photograph showed a very beautiful woman. I'm a sucker for beautiful women so I cast my "chick lit" fears aside and went straight for a pink-covered book with a fetching stylization of a woman facing away from the viewer on it's front cover and, Yes, a great picture of Ms Tessaro inside the back cover. Guys, I have to tell you that you shouldn't rule these things off out-of-hand. This is a fun read. Ms Tessaro has her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, she has a wicked sense of humor and has included a bit of the ridiculous in her story about flirting. Finely-crafted literature it is not, it doesn't have a complicated plot and it's not what we who served in the Royal Navy used to call an AFO (Admiraty Fleet Order for sexually-explicit assignations ashore) but it is fun. It's an easy read and it does not ask you to think long and hard about the subject matter after you have finished it - although you might just do that!I don't know if women would like it or not. I suspect my wife would call it "crap" and I'm sure my eldest daughter would get the same giggles out of it that I got. Daughter number two would probably fall somewhere in between those extremes. I'm going to read another one of Ms Tessaro's soon. I noticed that there's another one due out in 2010 - oh goody!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I'm not a big chick-lit reader, but I like Kathleen Tessaro's books. The Flirt is a fun book about flirting and love, and a quick and entertaining read in between 'heavier' literature.
    • 4/5
      In a genre flooded with tired cliches propounded by tired authors, Tessaro stands out as an original and compelling storyteller. She tells an unusual and hillarious tale of coincidence and mistaken identity while still delivering the tropes expected and adored by veteran romance readers. A perfectly phrased, beautifully witty and well structured romance.
    • 4/5
      This is an engagingly quick and fluffly read which is far better written than many other books of its genre. I particularly liked how Tessaro resisted the temptation to wrap everything up in a nice pat ending.
    • 3/5
      The book started out fairly slowly, as this genre is typically wont to do, but I found that it never really sped up after that. The characters were introduced over the first half of the book, and then the rest of the time seemed to be spent setting up the final hurrah in which all the stories come to a climax and resolve in about twenty chapters, start to finish. That was probably the most disappointing part of the book for me - realizing that I didn’t get to the crux of the story until nearly the very end and then had everything wrapped up quite neatly in one chapter.The character’s themselves were real and interesting, which is possibly the only thing that kept me reading. The only ones that I would say were above the reality of some of the situations were Valentine, the orchestrater and herder of male flirts, and Arnaud, a domineering, self-absorbed, controlling and entirely out-of-touch husband and socialite-slash-aristocrat. That’s really the nicest thing I could say about the character, and you know when there’s no redeeming quality about a character, they’re intended to only be a villain and not have any satisfying resolution or reform in the end. That’s just how books go.Probably the most interesting character was Flick, or Mary Margaret Flickering, who was Valentine’s go-to girl, who at first benefitted from his influence and at the last benefitted from leaving it. She had a realness to her and a likeability that I’ve rarely seen in characters who weren’t meant to be the main character, and I found it very pleasing.Other characters, such as Hughie, Leticia or Olivia who seem to be meant to vie for the position of main character, leave something to be desired. For none of these characters could I find an underlying thread which would make me identify and therefore sympathize with them. Without that ability to identify or at least sympathize, I find it difficult to like the main character as a main character. They seemed almost secondary.One thing that did seem pronounced in this was that the author clearly disdains the idea that money makes happiness (which most of us Americans seem to try to convince ourselves while simultaneously pining for more financial security), and shows that simple is probably better. That’s the idea I got out of this. People ended up happiest in the story not when they were clothed lavishly and living on unimaginable wealth but when they let themselves be comfortable with what they had, make things work even when they might be tight or not quite comfortable and went outside of their comfort zone. It came off a little bit like an after school special, actually, now that I consider it.Overall, this wasn’t a bad book. I can’t say that I wasted my time reading it. It is not a favorite and I wouldn’t say that it’s fantastic. I was never immersed enough in the story to render myself hesitant to put it down, but quite obviously I was able to finish it and in a reasonable amount of time. That’s more than I’ve been able to say about a lot of books that I’ve read.
    • 4/5
      I was pleasantly surprised with this book. I had just finished a heavy book about the Holocaust and wanted something light and fluffy. I enjoy Tessaro's prose immensely and she deftly fleshes out a dozen characters and interweaves their stories. Tessaro invents a profession and beautifully defines romance for women. Mirroring this are characters who have invented their own personas. Other reviewers were not satisfied by the ending but I felt it was 'just right'. Excellent beach or vacation read.
    • 4/5
      I'm not normally one to read 'chick lit', but I loved Tessaro's book, Elegance, and have read all her subsequent works. This was a very fun, yet touching, romp through London, romance, love and relatedness. By truly delving into the different characters, this book was impossible to put down, and I became attached to each quirky persona. Of course I would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of chick lit, but I would also recommend it to anyone who still wants to believe that love is out there. Some graphic language could put some people off, but it is erotic and discretely written, and works with the rest of the flow of the novel.
    • 3/5
      Newly released in June is Kathleen Tessaro's third novel - The Flirt.From the cover art I originally thought the novel was to be about a woman flirt. I was mistaken....The Flirt is set in London, England. We meet Hughie Armstrong Venables-Smythe in the first few chapters. A would be actor, he is perusing the classifieds and spies an intriguing advertisement:"Unique situation available for an attractive, well-mannered, morally flexible young man. Hours irregular. Pay generous. Discretion a must. Please send photo and brief romantic history"Hughie comes from aristocratic stock, but the family fortunes have paled and his name, posh accent, good looks and charm are what he's surviving on now.We are quickly introduced to many more characters;Leticia - Hughie's latest sexual dalliance - no strings attachedRose - a young single mother waitress who is attracted to HughieSam - a busy plumber currently working at Leticia's businessOlivia - the unhappy wife of a very wealthy man, ArnaudRicki - friend of Rose and Sam, gardener to OliviaJohnathan - works for Arnaud - and hates itAmy - Johnathan's perpetually pregnant wife....and other supporting characters.I've introduced the list of characters as in a playbill because that's the feel the book had for me. A delicious British romantic comedy. Somewhat along the lines of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. No farce, but lots of sly comedic lines and situations.Everyone is living their lives, but recognize that they aren't really happy. Hughie is hired by Valentine and Flick. I won't go much further in divulging the plot. Suffice it to say that Hughie's new profession touches everyone's lives.Each chapter is written from a different character's viewpoint. This did make the book hard to put down as I wanted to read yet another chapter before shutting the light off. Tessaro skillfully weaves all the stories together in a most satisfying ending - though not all as are you may have imagined.There is some minimal sexual language used that may offend some readers.This is a good summer chick lit book. If you like British authors such as Marion Keyes and Jane Green, you will enjoy Kathleen Tessaro. I read Elegance years ago and very much enjoyed it.
    • 3/5
      I am a huge fan of Chick Lit and I was thrilled to see that Kathleen Tessaro wrote a new novel. "The Flirt" is considered a romantic comedy and the title pretty well covers the subject matter - the author explores the fine art of flirting.In The Flirt, we find a group of wealthy people living in London who are all in various stages of discontent. Indeed, there are many main characters in this novel including the reverent and delicious Hughie Venables-Smythe (I even loved his name!) who has, it just so happens, a 'PHD" in the gentle art of "flirting" and is more than happy and willing to show off his skills.Each chapter is told from a different person's perspectives (which is a method of writing that I am not overly fond of). The Flirt is fun and breezy IF you can hold your disbelief - some of the plot does get a little bit farfetched, even for a romantic comedy.For those who may offend, there is some coarse language, although, honestly, this does not remove from the overall entertainment of this book.If you are looking for a fun, quick romantic comedy that will lift your spirits, then I recommend this great beach read.