Month: October 2017

Adaline Raine-Saving Abby, Marked by Fate Bk. 1

Adaline Raine has brought us a nice Halloween treat, ducklings. This story is included in the box set, Moonlight Magic, which is packed full of Halloween thrills and chills.

Abby has been different her whole life. She never gets sick, and if she gets hurt, she heals almost immediately. This led her mother to think that she didn’t feel a lot of pain because, well, if you heal that quick, you must not hurt, right? Wrong! Anyway, as an adult, Abby decides to try and find out more about herself and her condition. She’s spent years doing research, and finally found someone who will talk to her about it. On the night that she is supposed to meet her mysterious contact, she ends up being attacked. Raven tells Abby that she is now Raven’s. However, before anything can happen, her incredibly hot boss, Chase roars up and saves her. He yells several things to Raven about her crimes and that he will end her if she doesn’t leave Abby alone, and that Abby is his.

Chase is a multi-gazillionaire workaholic. He is secretive and doesn’t do a lot of interviews so no one knows anything about him. All his employees gossip and speculate about him. Their ruling theory is that he is gay. He knows a lot more about Abby and her situation than he’s letting on. He tells her she needs to do certain things to stay safe, but Abby is headstrong. However, when Raven comes after her again, she’s more than a little frightened.

OK, we’re going to part ways here. I liked this story. Interesting view on vampires. It can be hard to write vamps since they are always there and have been written about 20 different ways, but I like Adaline’s way. I also like the marks of fate. It’s going to be an interesting series. There is sex, violence, and cursing, all the goodies. However, I wouldn’t classify it as dark, paranormal isn’t necessarily dark. Sexy, yes, but not dark. The box set is only $0.99, so check it out.

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Totally cool pic, right? I really liked it.

Anyway, there were some scenes that I was like damn, Adaline, WTF did you just do? One of them is when Chase is trying to teach Abby to defend herself. I mean, woah. That was… yeah. I have to admit, I would’ve freaked out too, just like Abby did, because.. However, it did help her out when push came to shove and she was totally badass about it too.

I really did enjoy this story. It was a nice love story, but it didn’t go smoothly into their HEA, which I like. There were bumps and bruises and misunderstandings. I really prefer the bumps and bruises more than smooth sailing because it is more realistic to me. None of us have ever had a smooth path to our HEAs, right? I know mine wasn’t. And while I’m talking about unsmooth paths, let me take a second to wish my darling husband happy 23rd anniversary. That’s the vampire one, right? Totally stakes to protect us? Or is it the zombie one, where I get another sword?

That’s all I have to say today. We have some intense stories coming up. We have an age play story from Allysa Hart, who is new to me, Kneel from Dani Rene, and Exalted from Sansa Rayne, as well as more from Kit Rocha and the world of Sector 4. Meanwhile, happy reading!

 

Kit Rocha-Beyond-The People

Thursday was a brief overview of the world of the Beyond series. Today it’s all about the people. I’ll probably end up talking the most about the people of Sector 4, just because I love them so much. I love this series, it’s one I read, reread, and then read some more. I’ll go straight through the entire series and then the sequels and spinoffs. Yes, I am that person. I won’t talk too much about couples, just because I don’t want to give any spoilers away so it may seem like I gloss over some people. I’m also going to have to be careful because if I’m not, just this part will end up as 17 parts. I think I may just end up naming a few of the really key players. Of course, they are all key players, but… It’s so hard to write this post, you don’t even know! I mean, do I list all my favorite characters and couples? Do I list every single main character? Do I list them by books? I think that I will just list a few, and talk about more as I talk about the various stories. That’s probably the best way to do it.

Really, the characters are so good and so layered, and as each book goes on, we learn more about old friends and meet new ones. You can’t pick up the novels and read them out of order, but there are novellas that you can check out.

No discussion of the sectors can be complete without talking about Dallas O’Kane. He is the barbarian king of all he surveys. He rose up from nothing and created an empire on the back of his liquor. His real name is Declan, and he came from a ranch in TX, run by his mom. He eventually made his way to Eden and the sectors and started carving out his place. He took over leadership of 4 because he really needed to and now leads it as well as he can. He’s a responsible leader and does what he can to make the people of his sector have a good life. Dallas’ parties are legendary, for good reason. They turn into orgies. Really, the O’Kanes are into touching and affection, whether that means fucking or not, and there is A LOT of fucking, in any way that you can think of. Don’t let all that fool you though, Dallas is wicked smart and has a plan. He also has his queen, Lex.

Alexa Parrino, don’t call her that though, she will cut you, was born in Sector 2 and sold to Orchid House to be trained as a courtesan. Orchid House has always led 2, which means Cerys was the leader when Lex was there. Lex ran away as a teenager and lived on the streets of 3 as a thief. She was trained in just about every way you can manipulate a man, anatomy, politics, how to cut a bitch, all that kind of stuff. She is smart, tricksy, astute, and can read you in 10 seconds or less. She doesn’t just exude sex, she is sex. Dallas may be the power, but Lex is the finesse. Without either one, you don’t have the O’Kanes. She helped him build it up, after she got caught stealing from him. People who underestimate Lex end up with her knife being the last thing they see. I really want to be Lex if and when I ever choose to grow up.

If Dallas is the king, and Lex is the queen, then Nessa is definitely the O’Kane Princess. Nessa was born on Dallas’ family ranch, and he thinks of her as a little sister. Nessa and her grandfather followed Dallas up from TX. Nessa and her skills are vital to the O’Kanes and their success. She is the key to their fortune and is protected, sometimes a little much, by every O’Kane out there. The guys tend to run off anyone she’s interested in. She is their distiller and has been making the O’Kane booze since she was a teenager, taught by her grandfather. There are times that things have to happen to her alcohol that causes her pain. I like Nessa, mostly because there are things about her that I really connect with, in particular, her habit of trying new things until she gets bored, and then moves on. I’ve BTDT, and I’m pretty sure I may have made the t-shirt before I got bored.

Jasper and Bren are Dallas’ right and left hands. Jasper came out of the farms, having been sold to a farmer when he was a child. Jasper was given to Dallas and has been his good right hand and chief enforcer ever since. Bren is about as different to Jasper as you can get. He was Military Police in Eden, but was framed and kicked out. He is patient, careful, and methodical. If Dallas needs a sneak job or an assassin, Bren is the man to do it. He’s also really into pain, as in on Fight Nights, he lets he opponents beat on him for a while and then a willing volunteer takes her place in the cage with him.

Taken as a whole, the O’Kanes are a family, led by Lex and Dallas. Whether they came out of Eden, like Cruz, Noelle, Rachael, Bren, or out of the sectors, like Mad, Jade, and Ace, or out of other places like Jas and Six, they have all managed to come together and turn Sector 4 into a home and the O’Kanes into a family who accepts them and loves them.

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Katie Douglas-Her Cyborg Daddy

Katie Douglas has shown up here a couple of other times. She writes a lot of fun and lovely stories and tends to write a lot of age play stories. She has a series called 24th Century Daddies. Obviously, it’s an age play series and it takes place in the future. Her Cyborg Daddy (no buy link when I wrote this, I’ll post one asap) is the latest one in the series, which includes Her Daddy and Her Master and His Little Earthling. Full disclosure, I do own both of the others and really like them both. Age play isn’t a dynamic that I personally want to try, but I enjoy reading age play and DD/lg stories. These books could be read as stand-alone books, but they are all loosely connected, so it’s better to read them in order so that you know who any recurring characters are.

An Artificial Intelligence species has made contact with the Interplanet Alliance. They want to know more about the biological species in the Andromeda galaxy, as they have never encountered biological organisms much larger than bacteria. They have sent out an ambassador, Unit 7090 Mark III, to learn everything that he can.

Zanthia is a diplomat from Nidia. Nidia is where Emperor is based, as well as the entire government of the Interplanet Alliance. It’s the first of the Prime planets. Her job is to help put out galactic wide problems, stop wars, make sure that trade flows the way it should, all that type of jazz. Her dickbag boss tells her that she needs to go with the AI ambassador and show him eeeevvverrrryyyyything that he wants to know. Every.thing. If she fails or she doesn’t do it, Dickbag is going to send her to Pombos, a planet that is stuck in the Steam Age and where women are so undervalued it’s not even funny. So, off she goes with Unit 7090 Mark III, who decides that his name is too clunky, so now goes by Mark.

The first thing she does is give Mark a tablet that her boss loaded up with thousands and thousands and thousands of books. Unknown to her, some of the books that were on the tablet were all about age play. Mark decides, hey, that’s awesome, and that’s what I want to do. Zanthia has some problems because Nidia has all kinds of modesty laws, and that’s all she’s known.

OK, this is where we separate. I loved this story. There’s some medical play as part of it, but relatively mild. There is a whole lot of spanking, which fucking hell, so good. The story is more scifi than the other stories in the series, and the age play is a little more intense. This probably shouldn’t be anyone’s first intro to age play, but if it’s something you’ve read in the past and something that you enjoy, this would be a good addition to your library. You can always start with the first book in the series and work your way up to this one, and enjoy it. I enjoyed both Mark’s and Zanthia’s journey of discovery. I’ve been looking forward to the next one since I finished reading the words “The End”.

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So, when I say that the age play is a little more intense it’s because the other books tend to have heroines that regress to somewhat older children. With Zanthia and Mark, the regression is closer to toddler. He has her in diapers and uses strollers and such. That’s not everyone’s cup of cocoa. However, he still takes advantage of her skills and experiences as an adult diplomat. The intersection of her as an adult and as a little happening at the same time is really interesting and adds a great layer and complexity to the story, which is always something that I like.

When she’s on Sphereon, I felt really sorry for her. However, I did like that being there made her think about what happens in the IA and how the Prime planets treat the other planets. I also like that she used that feeling to help the bots on Sphereon.

I really like the connections that Katie writes. Her characters aren’t insta-love characters, they build up to being in love in a more organic way, but the connections that they make first are great. I think that it makes the stories more real if you can call scifi real, but you get what I mean.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say about this particular story. I hope that if you read it that you like it as much as I do. We have a story by Adaline Raine coming up, as well as more from Kit Rocha’s Beyond series. Meanwhile, happy reading!

Connectivity Issues

I may have some connectivity issues until the 1st. I’m doing what I can to fix the issue as soon as possible, but when you are working with the cable company, heavens only know when things will get done.

Don’t worry about blog posts, WordPress has a nifty schedule feature, so I will make sure that you guys still get all your review-y goodness. For now, just look at all the pretty, pretty pictures.

Kit Rocha-Beyond-Eden and the Sectors

Kit Rocha is a pseudonym for Donna Herren and Bree Bridges. They have another one as well, but that’s a subject for another day. Today we are looking at the cheerfully filthy world of the Sectors and the O’Kanes.

The Beyond series is post-apocalyptic and dystopian. In this series, the world as we know it ended in a series of solar flares, which pretty much killed off anything electrical, and pretty much ended the world. There was one city in the US which was prepared. Of course, it was prepared because they had some warning that this was happening. It was the city of Eden. Eden was supposed to be the most perfect, magical, wondrous thing ever. Of course, it wouldn’t be dystopian if that were true, now would it?

Outside of hygienic, self-righteous, sanctimonious, and puritanical Eden are the sectors. The sectors are dirty, gritty, run by different leaders, filled with gangs, and just about everything you could think of. There are 8 of them, and each one has its own flavor and its own thing.

Sector 1 is run by Gabriel Rios, the grandson of the Prophet. It’s run as a religious republic, full of love, light, and other sunshiny, sparkly things. There are a lot of artisans and crafters who live in Sector 1. Sector 1 also has Gabriel’s Riders, a group of fighters and enforcers who do Gabriel’s work. More about them later.

Sector 2 is run by Cerys, head of Orchid House. Sector 2 is all about courtesans and training girls to be courtesans. There are different Houses, specializing in different things. Generally, a House takes a young girl and spends years training her up until she gets sold to her patron. Lex was trained in Orchid House and Cerys wanted her to be her successor. We’ll learn more about Lex later too. Let’s just say Long Live Our Queen.

Sector 3, when the first book opens, is run by a guy named Trent. Pure fucking asshole. Sector 3 used to be one of the manufacturing bases for Eden until they got too uppity and Eden firebombed them. Now they are pretty much a pile of rubble. Dallas has to deal with the leaders though since the grain for his whiskey often comes from farms outside of 3.

Sector 5 makes medication and suchlike. They also make a lot of street drugs. The leader, whose name I can’t currently remember but who becomes more important in a couple of later books, is a right fucker. He likes to get young women strung out on his drugs and fuck them. He also makes sure that there is an ingredient that makes the drugs more addictive, even if they don’t need to be.

There isn’t a lot of difference between Sectors 6 and 7. They are both farming sectors, providing the majority of the food for Eden. Whatever is left, the farmers are welcome to have. However, Eden is greedy, and they want more and more and more, leaving the farmers with less and less and less.

Sector 8 is the head of tech and manufacturing. It’s run by Jim Jerrigan, a wily man who plots and schemes. We really don’t ever learn too much about him other than that, or spend much time in 8.

Outside of the sectors are the communes and illegal farms. The communes are another way for Eden to get food. Unlike Eden, which pumps contraceptives into the water, having babies is important on the communes. The more babies, the more people to work the farms and the more people who work the farms, the more Eden gets. It doesn’t matter if women wear themselves out working and having babies with the fertility drugs they are given, there are always more. Yeah, the people in Eden are a whole lot of fucking hypocrites. The illegal farms are just that. They’ll deal with just about anyone.

Outside of that, there is pretty much a wasteland. There are other people around, but there aren’t a lot of them and there aren’t a whole lot of settlements. Trade exists, but it’s hard to do, making imported goods really, really expensive.

You may have noticed if you were paying attention, that I skipped Sector 4. I did that for a reason. That’s because Sector 4 is where the majority of our stories take place. Sector 4 is led by our King, Dallas O’Kane. He’s a bootlegger and a damn good one. He has made a fortune by selling whiskey, good, better, and the absolute best ever. They also make some other kinds of liquor, but whiskey is what O’Kane is known for. He has Lex, his Queen, to help him. They met back when she tried to rob him and he caught her. But, she did help him build up his power base.

Dallas has a gang, the O’Kanes. They help him to run the sector. They are also all casually and cheerfully debauched. I take that back, some of them are debauched like it’s their job. All the O’Kanes wear tattoo cuffs around their wrists, laid by Ace, who is obscene, filthy, and talented. He uses the O’Kane logo for part of the cuff and then designs the rest of it depending on the person getting the cuffs. Each tattoo is different. Whenever a new O’Kane gets their cuffs, they drink in and have a helluva party.

The O’Kanes have a compound in which they live, make the booze, have fight night, and have their bar, the Broken Circle. The bar not only is a bar, but it’s also the setting for all kinds of shows, stripping, sex, whipping, so on and so forth. Then there’s Dallas’ party room. That’s where the O’Kanes let loose and really party. Those parties make Roman orgies look tame. Pretty much anything goes, as long as no one gets hurt more than they want, and it’s all consensual. You can have sex with anyone you want, any way you want, and in any number you want. If you want to play with a group, you can. If you want to be watched, you can. If you want to watch, you can. Basically, if it feels good, do it.

OK, I thought this was going to be a 2 parter, but I think it’s going to be a 3 parter, with part 3 on Sunday, talking about the newest book. Tomorrow is going to focus on the people of the Beyond series. Meanwhile, happy reading!

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Instafreebie

If you’re like me, odds are that your book budget is tight. Tight book budgets mean that you are always looking for good deals on books. There are a lot of sites out there that say that they have free books, but a lot of them are pirate sites. However, Instafreebie isn’t one of those sites. It is a legitimate site. They always have a good selection of free stuff to read, and they often run special promotions that you can take advantage of. For example, right now they are running horror specials in honor of Halloween, and a cyberpunk one that I’m fixing to look at. Those specials have a curated selection of books to look at. All you have to do is click claim, give it your email address, and click send. Getting it to your Kindle is super easy, just forward it to your Kindle email, assuming you have your email address set as a safe sender.

Go check them out and see if you can stretch your book budget.

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Danielle Fin-Yash

Danielle Fin is a new author to me. She doesn’t have a large catalog as of yet, but I expect that will change.

Yash is an interesting take on the aliens living on Earth kind of thing. The aliens came here a long time ago and then they left. Then in a more recent time, they came back. The various alien groups have villages where they live, generally more isolated from the humans. The humans and the aliens tend to live fairly peacefully. However, that isn’t always true.

In this book, we start with Maximus, a sergeant in the military, lands outside a small alien village, with his squad. Yash is one of the guards in the Zelenian village. While she and a recruit are talking to the humans, their village blows up. Yash and her recruit run back, but the majority of their people are dead. She is now the leader of the people of her village, and when she offers them the chance to relocated with the humans, the majority of the survivors choose to not go.

Overall, I think the premise of the story is good. I think that the characters have a good start, but could’ve used a little more fleshing out. There were times when I was confused over what was going on. I think that another round of edits and some more beta readers would have helped tighten it up, flesh out the characters, and get rid of some of the confusion that was going on. It wasn’t a bad story, and it wasn’t impossible to keep track of, so if you like scifi romance, go give it a chance. It’s a pretty light read, with some sex, and a nice HEA.

I don’t think I have much in the way of spoilers to say about it and those are all my thoughts, so I’m going to leave a nice picture here to look at. Thursday and Friday are going to get a Kit Rocha two parter. Meanwhile, happy reading!

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Blaire

Anita Gray has written a compelling story about a young woman who has been conditioned to protect her master. It’s real, it’s raw, and it’s brutal. I’ve reread it several times. Check it out.

“If you like your romance dark and twisted with a side of mind fuc$ery than this is for you!!!” Amazon reviewer

BLAIRE, Part 1 in the Dark Romance Series

Buy it here: http://amzn.to/2zE3vmO
Also enrolled in KU

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Rose Devereux-Breaking Grace

I haven’t reviewed Rose Devereux here on my blog yet, though I have read some of her other books. I think I’ll probably need to rectify not having more reviews of her books on here. This one, Breaking Grace, is one that I’ve been waiting on for a while, so when I got the opportunity to read an ARC, you better believe that I jumped on it with both feet. I’m so glad that I did.

This is such a good book. It stayed with me and made me think about it for quite some time afterward. I love stories that do that. This one is intense and dark and light and gritty and hopeful all at once. I’m not even sure if I can describe how I felt after reading this book, even after several days. I came out of reading it feeling refreshed and exhausted and hopeful and sad. See why it is hard for me to explain how I feel about this book?

In the end, BG comes down to perceptions and how even a small change in perception changes everything, how Grace perceives Bram, how he perceives her, how they both perceive James, and how you perceive the villain. It reminds me of the saying that there are 3 sides to every story, yours, mine, and the truth. That’s so true when it comes to BG. So, without any further ado, let’s get into this story.

Grace is a woman in mourning. Two years prior, her fiancee was shot dead by Bram. A witness says that it was a road rage incident, that Bram was driving like a madman and James followed him to his house, confronted Bram, and was subsequently shot. She can’t let go of her mourning, and it’s tearing her apart. Bram wasn’t charged, so she tried going after him with a wrongful death suit, which didn’t go her way. She hates Bram and wants to ruin him.

Bram has no problem with admitting that he killed James. He doesn’t talk much about it because he’s protecting Grace. He’s positive that she’s a liar and knows what really happened with James’ death, but for some reason, he wants to protect her. When he sees her in court, he is drawn to her, and he can tell that she is drawn to him, like two magnets.

When the party planning company that Grace is working for has to meet with Bram’s company for events, she walks away from her job. She goes home, writes him a letter, and tries to give it to him. She goes to his company and starts to create a huge scene, eventually getting to pass the letter on to him.

When she gets home, Issac (boo hiss) is waiting outside her apartment. She’s been locked out and he was sent to take her to her parents’ home. This leads to her falling apart.

Bram goes to a bar, rants to some friends, and talks about what he would like to do to Grace. He never meant for it to happen, but there are forces at work beyond his control.

OK, this is where we are going to part. Grace and Bram are so real. It’s so easy to be dragged into their story and have to stay in it until they can let you go, which may or may not be when you are done reading it. Like I said, it really stuck with me. One reason for that is that there is a part of BG that is deeply personal to me. The book would’ve been real to me as it was, but that just made it even more real to me. I could see everything in the book really happening, like Bram and Grace were my neighbors and I was watching it through my front room window. BG is currently $0.99 on Amazon, so grab it while you can.

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No one can tell who the villain is. Bram thinks it’s Grace, Grace thinks it’s him. The problem is that it’s neither. I’m not entirely sure that there is a villain, at least not in the traditional sense. There are bad people who do some bad things, but they aren’t so much in the story. Personally, my vote for villain is Issac and her dad. You can’t have one without the other, they are too wound up with the other. They are just barely around in the story at all. So, villains? Maybe. Can you have a story without a villain? That doesn’t mean there isn’t conflict. There is conflict out the ass.

Just because Bram isn’t the villain doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily a good guy. He’s done some bad, bad things. The title comes from the fact that he does literally tries to break Grace. He’s done interrogation in the past, and he’s going to use the same thing with Grace. But, it doesn’t exactly work out that way. He can be a total dick at some points, but overall, I think he’s just a guy, neither all good, nor all bad. It’s the same with Grace. She’s neither all good nor all bad. Thy are both imperfect and failable.

There is no insta-love here. In fact. there’s a lot of hate at the beginning. But, it eventually changes, bt it’s not something that happens overnight. They are attracted to each other, even if they hate each other, so that is an interesting dynamic. The chemistry between the two of them is pretty awesome, even when it has hate beams being carried along with it.

I always suspected that there was something up with James. He dies before the book begins, so it’s not like we have interaction with him, but I thought there was something wrong with him the entire time. The way that Grace talked about him just seemed too good to be true. I was pretty right on there.

Alright, if I say anything more on this book, I’ll probably never finish saying things, because it is so good. Go, read it yourself, then come back and we can talk about it more.

Tomorrow, we have Yash from Danielle Fin. I’m not sure what will be coming Thursday and Friday. If there is something you’d like to see, let me know! Meanwhile, happy reading!

Sophie Kisker-Fear and Desire

Sophie Kisker is one of my favorite authors, and she’s an all-around nifty person. Hi, Sophie! That would be why she shows up here a lot. Today, we’re talking about one of her books from her backlog. Fear and Desire used to be known as Captive of Fear and Desire, but Amazon is run by a bunch of pearl-clutching prudes, so she had to drop the Captive part. Luckily, she didn’t have to change the book, and we get a book full of non-con/dub-con goodness. F&D also shows up on my Top Ten dark and fucked up books list. I had just read it for the first time a few days before that post, I think, so this was a reread, so yay!

So, let’s just dive right into this one, shall we? Fair warning, this one is pretty dark all the way through.

Dan is an undercover Fed working on busting a human trafficking ring. There are a couple of reasons why he was chosen. One is that he’s from the area where The Farm, the group’s training facility, is based. The other is that he’s a Dom. The powers-that-be think that makes him perfect for training women to be sex slaves. The bosses don’t get the difference between consensual BDSM and forced training to be a sex slave. Pearson, the guy in charge? Is a massive douche of douchian proportions. Every time I’ve read the book, I’ve wanted to just reach my hands into the book and punch the guy and then strangle the shit out of him.

Anyway, Dan and his partner Josh, also a Dom, do what they can to help the women, including changing up the the “training” program so that the women can actually have something survivable and aren’t just beaten, raped, and broken. They both know that what’s happening to these women is going to cause psychological damage, but they are doing what they can to make it less.

Dan meets Laura for coffee on Saturday nights, after her shift on the OB ward. They were childhood friends who grew apart, but now that they live in the same area again, they’ve been getting closer and closer. One Saturday, Dan asks Laura, who doesn’t know for sure what he’s doing, if she’ll go away with him in a few weeks. What neither of them knows is that Marco, the incompetent nephew of the head of the ring, is spying on them. He’s got it out for Dan because he thinks he should be in charge.

The next thing we know, he’s kidnapped Laura and brought her to The Farm. His stated thought is that he’s doing it for Dan so that Dan has someone for him to use.

This is where we are going to part. Since I have things to say about this book, there will be spoilers. This book could be triggery in regards to rape, so be aware of that. Sophie has been careful in the way that she handled the situations, hopefully, it doesn’t trigger anyone because it is a good book. It is dark, it stays pretty dark, but when you get through that dark fucking tunnel, you do get an HEA. It’s on KU, but it’s only $0.99, so grabbing your own copy isn’t going to break the bank.

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When Laura figures out that Dan is there, she tries to run away, not to really run away but to make sure that Dan sees her. However, that means that she has to be punished, and it’s a pretty brutal one to her feet. That punishment also brings her to the attention to the big bad guy, who decides that he wants her, and he wants Dan to train her. He has very specific plans for Laura, and he wants her broken. If Dan won’t do it, then the nasty fuck nephew will. Dan is left with no choice.

Dan manages to get Laura away from the base, at least long enough to talk to her, under the guise of physical training. He explains to her what he needs to do and that it will be hard. She gives him her consent to do whatever it takes to get them both out safely. So, here’s the thing, can she truly be said to have given consent? While yes, she was willing to let him do what needed to be done, was it true consent since she really had no choice otherwise? It can’t really be consensual non-consent because that’s a voluntary thing. She would’ve entered into the relationship willingly, they would’ve discussed limits, punishments, likes, dislikes, so on and so forth. That’s not anything that could’ve happened in Dan and Laura’s situation. I suggested to Sophie back when I read this the first time, that maybe informed non-consent was a better phrase for it. Dan told her what she was going to have to live through, so she knew, but she can’t really consent, thus informed non-consent.

The last part of the Laura and Dan’s journey is terrible, just terrible, and intense. I was glad to get through it the first time and every other time, even though I knew what was coming up. I still got teary and all twitchy over it.

I think that all of Sophie’s stories are really good. I always look forward to the newest ones, and I like to reread the older ones fairly often. F&D is one that really grabbed me the first time, and it has grabbed me every subsequent rereading. Anyway, if you like dark, non/dub-con, but with an HEA, try out Sophie Kisker and check out this one.

Tomorrow, Breaking Grace by Rose Deveraux.

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