Review Tuesday: Mind Games by Cecilia Tan - #pnr #BDSM #ReviewTuesday

Mind Games by Cecilia Tan

Second edition, Self-published, 2018

Even as a child, Wren had unusual abilities. Sometimes she could sense the future. Sometimes she seemed to hear people’s thoughts. Sometimes her intuition told her things she couldn’t possibly know. Despite her talents, though, she didn’t foresee the tragic death of her parents—a lapse her younger sister Abby has never forgiven.

As an adult, Wren lives a deliberately quiet and solitary life, with her gay neighbor Lawrence as her only real friend. Her attempts to find romance and sexual satisfaction have failed miserably. She has closed herself off, body and mind, afraid of where her psychic powers might lead her. When Abby disappears, though, Wren is forced to act. She enlists the services of private investigator Derek Chapman, who discovers Abby may be associated with a shadowy sex club which has turned up in his research about another missing woman.

Wren and Derek try to keep their relationship professional, but neither can ignore the strong attraction that draws them together. In fact, when they are aroused, they can read each other’s minds. Even as the couple tentatively explores their sexual and emotional connection, Wren is plagued by mysterious erotic dreams involving a seductive, invisible man, and stalked by a shy but persistent stranger from work. Wren senses that the man who has invaded her dreams is connected with the sex club, but when she visits there during the day to ask about Abby, she doesn’t expect to be kidnapped, bound and ravished by multiple people.

Mind Games is a hot paranormal erotic romance with BDSM overtones. Wren is a strong and believable character, psychically precocious and sexually inexperienced, treading water in her life so she can avoid the depths of pain and uncertainty that lie below the surface. Derek is somewhat less compelling, a bit too good to be true with his sensitivity, his consideration and his big cock. The author tried to provide him with some tragic back story, but for some reason I wasn’t convinced by his fears and insecurities. As for Evan, the dream stalker, he’s revealed so late in the tale that there’s no time to really understand or appreciate him. I would have liked to know more about him and his psychically-marked crew, and especially, how Wren fit into their society.

Cecilia Tan has a gift for writing complex, intense, deeply arousing sex scenes, a gift definitely on display in Mind Games. She understands how imagination, emotion and trust ultimately determine the level of eroticism in an experience. When you can read your lover’s thoughts, when you know almost before he does what he craves—and vice versa—of course sex is going to be mind-blowing. I loved the sex in this novel, especially the gradual progression as Derek prepares the essentially virginal Wren, over multiple sessions, for his ultimate penetration. There might be nothing as hot as delayed gratification.

Nevertheless, again and again, I felt that the author was holding back. She toys with BDSM symbols and themes, but never lets herself really explore the power exchange dynamic hidden in this tale. I know this isn’t because of her own personal reticence; nobody writes more convincing and visceral BDSM than Cecilia Tan. I have to assume she wasn’t sure how romance readers would react if she set her imagination free.

The ebook I read includes a several page preview from Ms. Tan’s upcoming book Initiates of the Blood. This graceful, intense, stunningly erotic flogging scene offered a sharp contrast to Mind Games. Of course, Mind Games is a relatively early book for this author, possibly even her first romance after focusing mostly on speculative erotica. Her more recent romances in the Secrets of a Rock Star series show much greater confidence in mingling happily-ever-after with BDSM. I guess even stellar authors like Cecilia Tan improve over time.

In any case, Mind Games is well worth the read, an intelligent, arousing story that will please most fans of paranormal erotic romance.

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Suzanne will be giving away two ebooks of Watched to two lucky winners. Please use the Rafflecopter below to enter. Remember you may increase your chances of winning by visiting the other tour stops. You may find those locations here.

Blurb

Newly divorced Professor Evie Brown notices her student Cameron Slade and how attentive he seems, so totally unlike her ex-husband. Cameron is also delicious to look at, all taut body, broad shoulders, and hot eyes. He’s forbidden territory, but one late afternoon as she pleasures herself in an empty lecture hall, she looks up to find she’s not alone. He’s there…watching her.

And then there’s Sophie Walker. Ever since Evie met the sensual woman, she’s allowed her inhibitions to unreel, one by one. It’s Sophie who’s been sharing Evie’s erotic awakening, Sophie who she yearns for. Or is it?

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Excerpt

I wipe clean the whiteboard, enjoying the push of the felt, swinging from side to side as I move, the squeaking sound it makes as it erases the past three hours’ worth of hard work. An image replays over and over—that unexpected reveal of Cameron’s torso—a handspan of bareness, the grooved shadow of muscle. It was a shock to the sterility of that lecture hall. My mouth waters. Bare, taut skin—that male skin, so much rougher, harsher than a woman’s.

Male.

I replace the lids on the markers and switch off the projector. Alone. Facing late afternoon emptiness.

If Cameron were to give me something I’d like... I’d like him, close to me, all sweet-sandy raw male youth, at my knees. Male.

I swallow back the desire that is starting to slither through me, stroking the space between my neck and collarbone. Cameron. I picture the way he ran his hands through his lightly gelled hair, the bulge in his arms as his hands extended behind his head. The soft curve of his lower lip. That vulnerable stretch of torso that was making my mouth salivate like a beast before its slaughter.

About the Author

Suzanne Jefferies loves to write romance. As a member of ROSA (Romance Writers of South Africa), she knows that she’s not the only believer in romantic tension and emotional power smacks to keep the romance reader hooked. A movie fanatic, she spends most of her time as a writer-for-hire. Working in communication, she has done more than her fair share of corporate and investor PR, and now freelances in between editorial jobs for big. glossy company magazines. The Joy of Comfort Eating, her first contemporary romance novel, won the 2016 Imbali Award for excellence in romance writing.

Visit her website at www.suzannejefferies.com, tweet @suzannjefferies, Facebook: SuzanneJefferiesAuthor

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Fueled by Lust: Altair by @Celeste_Prater #SciFi #Erotic #Giveaway

Blurb

“Ah, my lovely sisters of fate,” Altair Battaglia whispered softly to the shimmering Insedivertus sky. “What future do you have in store for this humble servant? I await your sign with bated breath.” A calm mission to destroy a nasty drug czar would be nice. But then again, when is anything ever easy? Especially when a set of wide green eyes and red-stained luscious lips has this seasoned warrior oblivious to everything around him…even her lethal Glock-19 hovering inches from his chin.

Fierce, determined, and carrying a burden heavy enough to make a weaker person weep in defeat, Makenna Dunn never thought life would ever cut her a break. How could she have even imagined a mysterious stranger interrupting her deadly goal might flip her world upside down and thaw her frozen heart?

Fast paced and screaming hot, Book 11 in the FBL Series yet again tugs your heart, tingles your senses, and leaves you panting for more. Get ready!

Excerpt

“Angeli,” he growled against her damp hair smelling of vanilla and alluring female. “I’m honored at your trust.”

“Just shut up and kiss me before I start thinking too hard.”

Puffy moist lips crashed into his own. He moaned with enthusiasm at her aggressiveness, opened his mouth, and sucked her tongue inside. They dueled for supremacy, causing his dick to push even harder against unforgiving jeans. Her need was raw, thrilling, and matching his own. She clung to him, fingers digging into his shoulders and egging him on with her groans of elated approval.

Around and around he turned, lost to the sensations of finally experiencing a full, uninterrupted kiss from his female. He was hopelessly lost to her presence—bumping into tables, knocking over a chair, and grunting as he slammed into yet another wall. He broke for air, hauled in a lungful of her delicious scent, and fought to do something his mind was totally against happening. He set her down.

Altair tore at his shirt, uncaring of the ripping fabric. He wanted it off. She’s too far away, his befuddled mind screamed. He cried out at the exquisite sensation of her fumbling with his belt, knuckles bumping against his belly. She clawed at his zipper, finally released it, and shoved the jeans to his thighs.

“Oh my God,” she mumbled.

Buy Link

Fueled By Lust: Altair – Released exclusively on 1/24/2016 at http://www.bookstrand.com/celeste-prater and available at major retailers in 4-6 weeks.

About the Author

Author of the award winning, bestselling series FUELED BY LUST and THREE DIVISIONS trilogy, Celeste has received countless praises for her unique writing style, ability to create memorable characters and mesmerizing worlds for the reader to romp, dream, and drool. Action, suspense, mystery, and sizzling hot, loveable hunks continue to bring on “Top Picks,” “Best Book,” “Book of the Month,” and “Reader’s Choice Favorite” accolades. Her decidedly favorite professional review comment from Long and Short Reviews, “Book one caught my attention, book two had me hooked and asking for more, book three caused my addiction, and book four fed my habit. Now I’m left sitting here hoping for more, like a junkie strung out on alien men,” has gleefully kept her nose to the keyboard and sharing with the world the Fueled By Lust Insedi Warriors and the lucky females who snag them.

Buy Links for All Books:

Bookstrand http://www.bookstrand.com/celeste-prater

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ITUNES https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/fueled-by-lust-drusus/id826723786?mt=11

Celeste loves to engage with her readers. You can find her here:

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This isn’t thin reading, either folks!

Over 330,000 words of face fanning, sizzling hot erotic romance, action, mystery, and suspense to sink your teeth.

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Review Tuesday: Sheet Music by M.J. Rose (#erotic #review #suspense)

Sheet Music by M.J. Rose

Evil Eye Concepts, 2014

Justine Pagett is an unusually sensual woman. The warm, butter-and-sugar smells of fresh baking, the smokey blackberry taste of vintage cabernet, the breath-stealing sting of the wind on her cheeks as her sailboat skims the waves, the teasing sensation of brandy dribbling down across her naked breasts, Justine experiences all these sensations with fierce, almost frightening, intensity. Justine is a woman who orgasms standing in a doorway, listening to her lover play his cello half a room away.

Not only does she feel these things, she describes them with awesome clarity. She is a keen observer of her environment and her fellow humans, a professional journalist, a "wordsmith", as her father calls her at the age of ten.

The intriguingly complex protagonist of M.J. Rose's novel Sheet Music, Justine cannot help succumbing to the lure of her senses. She hardly tries to resist. She struggles valiantly, though, to decouple her senses from her emotions, to distance her body from her heart. She leaves lovers precisely at the moment when they become attached to her. She shuns her father and sister, blaming them for her mother's unhappiness and early death. She lives a cold, lonely, empty life in Paris, deliberately seeking out the ambiguous comfort of purely physical release, allowing herself true passion only in the realm of her career.

Sensation and emotion are intricately linked, however, and Justine cannot escape from either grief or love. Sights and smells constantly reanimate memories of her mother, a chef who initiated Justine into the sweet mysteries of the palate when Justine was still a child. And when a writing assignment brings her back into the life of cellist-composer Austen Bell, she rediscovers an irresistible emotional connection that goes far beyond their incandescent physical couplings.

Justine is a woman living a lie, or trying to, desperate to sever any emotional attachments for fear that she will fall prey to the weakness she saw in her mother: loving too much. She uses words as a weapon to push away the emotions clamoring for her attention, having discovered as a child that "the process of thinking about what word described my feeling took my mind off the feeling." For the three years since her mother's death from cancer, she has managed to maintain a facade of detachment, brutally suppressing the grief that periodically overwhelms her. As she begins research for a biography of the celebrated composer and conductor Sophie de Lyon, though, her mask begins to disintegrate.

Returning to New York from her self-sought exile in Paris, she is forced to deal with her family, living and dead. Meanwhile, she receives ominous threats warning her against writing about Sophie, and the presence of Austen Bell (Sophie's student and ex-son-in-law) wakens a yearning in her that she cannot ignore. Grief, anger, love and fear roil beneath her polished surface, finally reaching a crisis when Sophie mysteriously disappears.

The character of Sophie mirrors and illumines Justine's nature. Like Justine, Sophie is exquisitely sensual and voraciously sexual. The mansion she has made into her music academy, Euphonia, is a fantasy castle perched at the ocean's edge, the walls encrusted with seashells, the gardens a riot of color and scent, every detail personally chosen by its mistress. Sophie is beloved and notorious, a force of nature as much as a woman. Justine senses that there are secrets lurking behind Sophie's public personna. As she investigates, she is drawn into a maze of seduction, deception and danger where her defenses gradually erode.

Sophie never actually appears in the story. We understand her only through the effects she has had on other people, through her work, and through the stories others tell of her. As Justine sifts the truth from the lies, she opens herself for the first time to her own truth and the truth about her mother, who has become, in Justine's memory, as much a mythical figure as Sophie.

Sheet Music is compelling psychological study, a family drama, a thriller. It does not belong to the conventional genre of erotica, but Ms. Rose conveys Justine's sexual intensity as vividly as she portrays her heroine's stunningly painful grief. She shares Justine's dreams and fantasies, dreams of her body being played like a cello by an unseen man, fantasies replaying what might have happened as she and Austen sat together in his car, when he didn't touch her, but he might have... Justine wants to believe that physical desire is all that matters, but she can't, quite:

"I've always thought of kisses as being of the night, of the darkness. But I glimpse colors and light moving in time to music when his lips are on me. The colors move inside me, relieving me of gravity. I might lift off in this light."

Then in the next breath:

"I pull back, break the connection. I've made a mistake and have to undo it."

Sheet Music uses food as shorthand for emotional and physical intensity. In the very first paragraph, Justine says of a lover, a famous chef who creates fabulously sensual "postcoital feasts":

"He knows I am always hungry. He doesn't know that, no matter what I eat, I am never full."

The book offers a feast of many flavors: the bitterness of regret, the saltiness of desire, the sweetness of love, the sour taste of desperation. Justine uses the vocabulary of the senses to convey the nuances of the heart.

There's a whiff of tragedy in Sheet Music. Justine comes perilously close to losing her self, losing a chance for fulfillment, reconciliation, forgiveness. Her fatal flaw? Blindness, perhaps, or arrogance (knowing she is clever enough to manipulate people, she does not hesitate to do so). Reading Sheet Music, seeing the world through her eyes, I wanted to shake her, to remind her that her acute senses and emotional intensity were a gift, not a burden. Ultimately, though, my sympathy for her overwhelmed my annoyance. She suffers, and finally experiences some kind of redemption. A reader can hardly ask for more.