Chestnut Springs & the Art of Romcom Writing (Part 2: the Forbidden Fruit)

Hello, lovelies! Last week, we discussed how Elsie Silver's immaculate quintet of Hot Cowboy Books, the Chestnut Springs series, masterfully handle the concept of a Third Act Breakup. While doing so, I mentioned the possibility of discussing some of the series' more R-Rated positive qualities, and that's what we're here to do today.

Yes, that's right, it's time to talk about smut.

Let's get something clear right off the bat: I have no interest in breaking down the minutiae of literary sex scenes because frankly that's a bit like dissecting a joke: the more you do it, the less good it becomes. THAT SAID: what we will be discussing is CONTEXT, because that is a huge part of what makes spicey content work (in my opinion).

Speaking of context: what's important to understand about these books is that Silver very cleverly builds all of the heat in her books around the concept of the Forbidden Fruit. People want what they can't have; it's human nature. The more something is off-limits, the more it's taboo, the more appealing it becomes. And that is never truer than it is in sex and romance.

All five Chestnut Springs novels invoke this concept to some degree with their central pairings. It's immediately obvious with Summer and Rhett in book 1, Flawless: she's his boss' daughter, he's technically her client that she's supposed to supervise for several months. Summer's dad, Kip, literally tells both of them there is to be absolutely no canoodling whatsoever. It doesn't help that Summer (who is seven years younger than Rhett, and if you think that's a big age gap then you ain't seen nothing yet) had an adolescent crush on Rhett when he was first making waves in the pro bull riding circuit, with her fifteen year old self having a poster of him in her room that she frequently gawked at.

For her, it's the adolescent fantasy come to life, the thing that can't possibly be real, the man who can't possibly be real. There's no way she should do this: it's weird, it's unhealthy, for her to get seriously romantically attached to someone who she used fawn over a picture of. And moreover, he's a client. It's an inherent conflict of interest, and all he's supposed to be is a job that'll last a few months and then she can go back to Calgary and pretend she wants to be a sports agent for the rest of her life.

But then it turns out he is real. And that he's more than she ever imagined. He's surprisingly sensitive and goofy, cares for his family and gives them most of his money, genuinely wants a serious relationship after a decade and a half of slutting it up to diminishing returns. He's kind and considerate and shockingly emotionally vulnerable, with his bull riding adrenaline junkie lifestyle fueled by the fact that it's the only thing that a middle-child like him has ever had that's completely his and his alone. He's more than the poster, more than the image. He's a good man with a beautiful soul. And also, he goes down on his women (because that's what real men do).

 As for Rhett... Well, he walks into a boardroom meeting with Kip and finds Summer sitting there, all painted nails and fancy clothes and haughty attitude. One conversation with her is all he needs to conclude that she's just some prissy city girl who's too high maintenance for her own good. Sure, she's beautiful, but she's so far from the type of woman he usually goes for it's not even funny. And besides, that's his boss' daughter! His boss who he's on thin ice with already, his boss who puts his hand on Summer's shoulder and says, 'this is my princess, and she is off limits.' There is nothing about this that gives the slightest hint of a green flag. There is nothing about her that he is supposed to want.

And then she winds up staying at his family ranch and instantly gets chummy with his family. And then she shows an affinity for small-town living he never expected. And then she does her homework on his profession, becomes a fan in the truest sense both of the sport and of him personally. And she keeps surprising him, with her wicked tongue and impish sense of humor, with her empathy towards his situation as an industry legend on the last legs of his career, with an understanding that he does not want to quit and she, unlike everyone else in his life, is not going to try to get him to. She likes him because he's him, not because he's some idealized image.

They're on the road together, and Summer winds up shivering in a hotel room without heating. So Rhett, gentleman that he is, invites her to his room. Only one bed. And he's too much of a gentleman to let her sleep on the floor, and she's too worried about his back injuries to let him sleep on the floor. And just like that, the Forbidden Fruit is lying right next to both of them, within grasp. One of them just has to reach for it. They make it through one night without giving in but waking up in each other's arms the next day makes it impossible to deny what they feel for each other. Eventually, the yearning gets to be too much, and they give in. He gives her everything she's ever been denied: tenderness, affection, oral sex, the works. And she gives him everything he's always longed for: a rock, someone who supports him in everything he does but isn't afraid to call him on his bullshit, someone who challenges him to be better than he already is but accepts him warts and all.

It's hot as fuck. The two of them, desperately trying to avoid reaching across the proverbial Walls of Jericho, each second they deny themselves only making them want it more. And this is probably one of the tamer examples in the series.

Book 2, Heartless, goes even further with the concept. As I alluded to in part 1, the fruit is forbidden because once again, he's her boss, and also there's an age gap. Except this time, she's acting as his live-in nanny for the summer, he's thirteen years older than her, and both of them know this is a bad idea.

Like that's gonna stop them, though.

So, I should probably also mention that they meet at a coffee shop where Willa accidentally drops her panties in front of Cade. Because she was keeping a pair of them in her purse. Because she doesn't always wear them when she's out and about. Which, for a pent up guy like Cade, is a major turn on, but also, he's supposed to let this woman watch his child for three months? Except, she's good at it. His son, Luke, loves her immediately, and she adores him but is still able to put him in his place when necessary. So, Willa and Cade settle into a rhythm: he asks her every day if she's wearing underwear, and she responds by flirting at him super hard, and he desperately tries not to let it get to him. Because, frankly, he has every reason to believe she's off limits. She's the nanny, a decade and change younger than him, free-spirited and vivacious and sexually liberated. He'd have to be a complete and utter creep to seriously consider getting with her.

Except she quickly proves she's more than just a nanny when she sticks her neck out for his son in the face of social ostracization from the rest of the town; except she proves herself shockingly emotionally mature when she calls him out on his stuffy, stoic bullshit and makes it clear she actually does like him as a person; except she proves she's not nearly as free-wheeling as she seems, that she's honestly tired of the bar-tending, late-night, hard-partying life she's had since eighteen; that she'd honestly prefer something quiet and simple and steady. Something like a family with Cade.

Did I mention that a lot of this comes out in conversations that the two of them have half-naked in a hot tub? Because it does. And the rotating first-person narration of both characters lovingly describes each other's physique in intimate detail while they get increasingly emotionally intimate with one another. It's great. You can feel them being drawn to each physically and emotionally, like every moment they spend resisting it only draws them closer and closer together. Even when Willa gets sick and Cade takes care of her, Cade tries to de-escalate it by saying she's got her whole life ahead of her and this won't go anywhere. Which of course makes Willa swoon over what an upstanding, mature guy he is.

The moment that clinches it is when Cade attempts to defuse the tension by pawning her off onto someone else for a date, only for Willa to arrive at Cade's house having not slept with anyone; they get into an argument about how Cade sees Willa as some stupid kid, how it's wrong for him to want her, how she shouldn't want him... Which, surprise, makes her want him more. And then we get the single hottest blowjob scene I've ever read (because God, these books love oral sex), followed by Willa running off because of course Cade doesn't really want her... And then he kicks her door down and says yes he does, followed by a night sweet, hot lovemaking.

The point of all this is that oftentimes, we find ourselves attracted to people who we think, for whatever, we're not supposed to be. That society says 'this is wrong', that it contradicts the way you were raised, that this shouldn't be what you like. Obviously, there are times when you really shouldn't like something or someone because it's genuinely immoral or illegal or both, but within reason it's hard not to fantasize about the forbidden. And fiction helps us through these desires, helps us unpack and understand what we like and don't like and why we feel that way about it. And as someone who has been on the receiving end of 'I'm not supposed to be attracted to someone like you' A LOT (it's how it goes ninety percent of the time), there's something very fulfilling and affirming to a story, to a series, built around the idea of 'I'm not supposed to want a woman like you, not supposed to want you specifically, but I do anyway and I'm not afraid to come get you.'

We'll circle back to book 3 (there's a lot to talk about there), but first, I want to get into Reckless and Hopeless. Hopeless follows Beau Eaton, traumatized military veteran, and Bailey Jansen, bartender and not-so-proud member of the most hated family in town. Beau is, to say the least, not coping with civilian life very well, and he takes to hanging out at the bar with Bailey to make sure nobody sexually harasses her. He's 35, all man, worldly and experienced and beloved, and she's 22 and, as the back cover blurb puts it, 'all virgin.' She and Cade, despite growing up next to each other, have not really interacted at all, so no, it's not weird. But, as he notes early in the book when admiring her tracts of land, when she was born, he was already a teenager. Which of course makes him feel like a total creep. But it doesn't help that Bailey, who is very eager and very curious about sex, keeps asking him questions like 'have you ever done anal' or 'have you ever had a threesome', or that, as he discovers, she's taken to swimming in the river that separates his family's property from hers underneath the moonlight. Naked. His narration even notes that he's been swimming in that river his whole life but never known she was there, and then one day she just shows up in the water like some kind of beautiful mermaid (swoon).

When they enter their fake engagement arrangement, they both agree that they can't have sex. But obviously this doesn't stop them from thinking about it, with Bailey regularly noting how much it infuriates all the women in town that 'trailer trash' like her is suddenly with the town prince, how much she wants him but also doesn't want her virginity being treated like some prize for him to win, and Beau constantly noting how inappropriate the whole thing feels, that Bailey is younger than him, has her whole life ahead of her, deserves the world but shouldn't ever feel less than or like a charity case. So, they can't have sex. But that doesn't stop them from frolicking naked in the river together in the wee small hours of the morning to help Beau deal with his trauma, and it doesn't mean there aren't digital and oral workarounds to the deal they can use. And every step of the way, Beau fights it while also trying to make everyone believe he can't keep his hands off of her. And every step of the way Bailey tells herself that she doesn't deserve him, that she needs to become her own person, that she needs to leave this town in the dust to finally become her own person... While also constantly getting horny for him in public. Which leads to a very hot scene of Beau teasing her on a Ferris wheel to the point of nearly coming (if you're into exhibitionism, this one is for you).

And yeah, maybe it's the mermaid motif, maybe it's the whole 'he wants me even though I barely feel like a woman' thing, maybe it's the part where he wants the Forbidden Fruit so badly he's willing to walk away from an incredibly cushy life in Chestnut Springs for her... But this one hits me in the feels. And because of Bailey's pariah status, she needs to leave, and Beau realizes that the only way to pluck that apple is to leave with her. Because, and this important, if the fruit is really that forbidden, there will be consequences to taking it. Things just kind of work out for Willa and Cade, and to a lesser extent for Summer and Rhett as well (albeit not without a lot of angst), but there is blowback for both Bailey and Beau as they fall in love. Between them getting into arguments with each other about what all this means to the hostility of the townsfolk to the downright psychotic behavior of Bailey's family, leaving is the only way they can be together. Because love is worth it. It's worth the sacrifice. It's worth the consequences of it being forbidden. And if you want it, you need to be willing to fight for it (another thing that speaks to me on a fundamental level, funny that).

Reckless, meanwhile, is something of a formula break. Winter is actually older than Theo... by a whopping two years, something Theo even jokes about. They hook up within the first fifty pages of the story, and much of it involves the fallout of that action (namely, baby Vivienne) and them learning to coparent together while falling in love. And the Forbidden Fruit aspect largely comes from Winter being convinced that that's what she is, that she's unlovable, that Theo shouldn't want her because she's an icy bitch, that the only thing she had going for her was her looks and pregnancy and single motherhood have 'ruined' those (because she's never heard of MILFS, apparently). She's convinced he isn't supposed to want her, and this apparent from their first meeting in which Winter blatantly gawks at him in public and then gets mad when he tries to pursue her... Which of course turns him on (to quote New Girl: 'You've gotta stop being so mean to me or I swear to God I'm gonna fall in love with you!')

And while some of Theo's behavior does walk up to the line of being a little too forward... A., it's fiction, and B., Winter needs someone who is willing to fight for her. Her biggest enemy is quite literally her own self-loathing and that is where the whole 'you need to fight for the Forbidden Fruit and live with the consequences' of it all comes into play. Because he does fight for her, making it clear with every action that he really does want her, that she's still every bit as beautiful as she was before the baby, that she's not nearly as cold as she thinks she is. And as for living with the consequences... Yeah, he takes to fatherhood like Willa takes to being a Ranch Wife (swimmingly). It's my favorite book of the series, both because of the main couple themselves as well as how well it plays with your expectations in order to make the journey, make Theo claiming that proverbial apple and Winter allowing herself to be claimed, all the sweeter. Because love is worth fighting for, even when you think you don't deserve it, even when you think you're not supposed to have it (sigh).

And then... Then there is book 3, Powerless. Oh good golly, where do I even begin? This one is on a whole 'nother level in terms of the Forbidden Fruit thing, because it's present on multiple levels. So, I'll be straight up: this one gets right up to the line of being weird, for a couple of different reasons. I will now list those reasons and do my best to explain why the book successfully argues it is still okay for the main couple, Jasper and Sloane, to be together.

First of all: crime. Jasper has an immense amount of childhood trauma stemming from the death of his little sister and subsequent abandonment by his parents. Because of this, as well as his self-made man hockey goalie reputation, Sloane's manipulative assclown of a father told Jasper point blank that if he ever tries to get with her, he will use his considerable money and influence to destroy Jas' career. So, blackmail is a factor in this one. Fortunately, Jasper has a backup career planned for when he ages out of hockey and Sloane eventually grows a spine and tells her dad to go fuck himself.

Second: Sloane has been manipulated and controlled by said assclown of a father her entire life, to the point where most of her arc is about realizing just how toxic the man is (he tried to marry her off to an adulterous poacher named Woodcock to further his own financial interests (I swear I'm not making this up)). Sloane literally becomes a runaway bride in the first act, and realizes she needs to gain control and power over her life. The problem? She's hopelessly besotted with Jasper, who is... deep breath  a Dom. I.E., a dominant, in the context of a master-servant kink. He's a sweet, thoughtful, empathetic man with a deeply dirty streak hiding behind those soulful eyes, and he is aware of how that might be a bit off-putting to a woman who's only just now stretching her wings and learning to fly on her own, how that might not be okay. But it turns out Sloane is SUPER INTO THAT SHIT, and as she takes more control of her life, the idea of giving up control to someone who she loves and trusts completely becomes more and more appealing (and yes, this leads to some incredibly hot smut as Jasper becomes more and more comfortable ordering her around).

Third: while not the most extreme age gap in the series, Sloane is six years younger than Jasper, and they first met when she was eleven and he was seventeen. deeper breath Now, I really want to emphasize this part: Jasper did not at any point put the moves on her when she was a kid. They also didn't interact regularly- they spent a few summers together and were nothing more than friends. Sloane DID, however, have a crush on him almost immediately, and she did ask Jasper to be her senior prom date when she was eighteen, but Jasper let her down gently on the grounds of him being twenty-four and how it seem a bit inappropriate. She also tried to escalate their relationship to more than friends yet again a few years later, but Jasper, still wary of the difference in ages, played it off as a joke (and then got blackmailed by her dad). But yeah, by the time that Jasper actually starts reciprocating her feelings, she's well into her twenties, and by the time they start acting on those feelings during a road trip to British Columbia, he's 34 and she's 28. As such, I'm comfortable saying no, it's not weird.

And fourth, deepest breath of all everyone in their lives considers them cousins because Jasper was all but legally adopted by the Eatons at 17 when Beau declared him his new best friend and offered him a place to stay (Jas genuinely considers Beau his brother and Harvey his dad) and Sloane is Beau and the other Eaton boys' first cousin on the their late mother's side. This part is mostly played off as a joke: 'we're not cousins' is practically a running gag, they were not raised together, and every time someone asks about it one of them responds with 'he/she is my best friend'. Granted, there is one scene in which a character from Silver's previous series, Gold Rush Ranch (obligatory 'what is this, a crossover episode' joke), says in reference to the whole thing 'fuck, that's hot', so it's arguably having your cake and eating it too. However, my ultimate take is that if Clueless' central pairing of two ex-step-siblings hooking up is okay than so is this. And hey, at that point they can just tell people Jasper married into the family (even if Harvey keeps joking about how their babies will have tails) (spoilers: their baby does not in fact have a tail)).

All of this to say: there's lot working against these two. Seemingly everything in Jasper and Sloane's lives has always told them 'no, this can't happen', including each other at various points. But all that forbidden desire, building up for years and years and years, is just the icing on the cake of true love. Sloane, who is a professional ballerina, at one point compares herself to a dancing figurine in a music box, opened up and admired when wanted and put away when not. But she only wants to dance for Jasper. She's only ever wanted to dance for Jasper. She's spent her whole life dancing and hoping he'll come for her, and finally, finally he does. And she fights for him, and asks him to fight at her side, to take the risk with her, to potentially risk everything for her. And he hesitates, yes, but ultimately, he shows up. He wants her to dance for him and him alone, no matter the consequences, no matter the jokes or the stigma or the blowback. He loves her. And it's not just because he can't have her. Truthfully, he could've had her at any time. But he said no when he should have, and as the years passed by and true love began to blossom inside his broken heart, he realized that it didn't matter what anyone else has to say about it. All that matters is how he feels.

That's probably the ultimate thesis of the series. You want what you can't have, and you love what you want to keep. To hold onto forever. And if it's real, you'll go wherever you have to, do whatever you have to, in order to hold onto it. Even if it's forbidden (which admittedly can help make the sex better), even if it's a risk, even if you're afraid of how much you want it. Because when it's real love, you don't just want the Forbidden Fruit, you need it. And you aren't afraid to reach up and take it.

Happy reading, lovelies.