Series: Serve #2
Published by Macmillan on 2014-10-27
Genres: Erotic Romance
Pages: 226
Format: eBook
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A sexy category romance from Entangled's Brazen imprint...
He’ll train her to lure another man. She’ll lure him instead.
When interior designer Eliza Ballas accompanies a friend to New York’s premier BDSM club, she’s taken aback by the sheer want that overruns her body—especially when a sexy Brit assumes Eliza is adept at dark, sensual arts. If she’s going to play, she’ll need an erotic education, and she knows just the man to teach her how to submit…
Oliver Preston isn’t one to turn down pleasure, but Eliza’s his sister’s best friend, and he’s torn between a sense of duty and his rock-hard need to find out if she tastes as delicious as he’s dreamed. Unable to handle the thought of another man owning her body, he draws Eliza deep into his world of exquisite pain and pleasure. He has three lessons to instruct her. Three lessons to drive them both to the brink of ecstasy. And three lessons before he must give her to another man...if he doesn’t lose himself first.
FTC: I am a rabid fan girl of Tessa Bailey’s Erotic Romance. I honestly can’t tell you if this is an unbiased review but all opinions expressed are my own. I did get the review from the publicist for a fair and honest review …
This is the second book in the Serve BDSM series. I will mention at this point I thought there was definite Dominance/submission but very little bondage, sadism or masochism. This didn’t actually hinder my enjoyment of the book but it is worth noting if you are going into this book for the BDSM content.
Saying Oliver is a bit of a playboy is like saying that Hugh Hefner has a mild penchant for blondes; the man has so many notches on his bedpost they must be matchsticks by the time of this book, which makes his journey from playboy to Mr Monogamy much more fun for us sadistic readers. At the start of the book, we find out he has always had a little bit of a crush on Eliza but she is off-limits as she is his sister’s best friend. Of course that all goes out of the window when he sees her about to embark on a BDSM discovery session at the local BDSM club. Jealousy rears its ugly head when he sees her with her suitor (Gavin Rossdale lookalike? Yum!) and he makes her an offer that she can’t refuse; three kink “lessons” with him and then he’ll set up a date for her himself with said Rossdale hunk. Yes, romance readers, the idiot doomed himself as soon as he gave into the green eyed monster and made the deal … yay!!
What follows is an incredibly erotic and angsty book that includes possibly the dirtiest hero Tessa Bailey has written to date (I know, I was shocked too). Oliver is a dirty, DIRTY man who cannot fathom what all these emotions are swirling inside him when it comes to Eliza. All he knows is that when he is with her, he has to rip all of her clothes off and boss her around and when he thinks of her with another man, he gets rather mad and starts with angry sex talk (which is…. panty melting). I loved watching his transition from cocksure playboy to bewildered love-sick fool. I only wondered how many screw ups he was going to make before he accepted he was retiring his stud title.
Eliza is a different kind of heroine from Ms Bailey’s usual protagonists. She is very sure of herself in a professional capacity but when it comes to her personal life she is sure of absolutely nothing. She is unsure of Oliver’s feelings, she is unsure of her own feelings and she is definitely unsure as to her own submissive tendencies and what she should do with them. It gave her a vulnerability that I thought was a very good match to Oliver’s character; his inability to process and cope with own feelings gave him some incredibly spiky edges (which were fun to read) but her character softened them and stopped them becoming into something that was too dark. I liked that.
This book has such a different feel to the rest of the books that this author has written. It has a much richer plot than some of her previous tales but it is the characters that really make it shine; I think the character depth and development within this one is the thing that will keep me rereading it again and again. It may be my favourite of her books, I’m not sure. I think I’ll do a reread to check (with a handy ice-bucket nearby).
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