Love is like an avalanche. It hits hard, fast and without mercy.

At least it did for me when Sculpt, the lead singer of the rock band Tear Asunder knocked me off my feet. Literally, because he’s also a fighter, illegally of course, and he taught me how to fight. He also taught me how to love and I fell hard for him. I mean the guy could do sweet, when he wasn’t doing bossy, and I like sweet.

Then it all shattered.

Kidnapped.
Starved.
Beaten.
I was alone and fighting to survive.
When I heard Sculpt’s voice, I thought he was there to save me.

I was wrong.

(It is highly recommended to read “With You” the novella first).


*Warning: This book contains some disturbing situations, strong language and sexual content. Over 18 years.

We’re only broken when we’re apart.”

Holy shit. Wow. I had no idea what to expect from this book, but I was not expecting it to be as good as it was. The best advice I can give you is to go into this absolutely blind. Don’t read reviews as even some of the most minor stuff can be spoilers. I will try to sum this up the best I can without giving anything away.

One minute Emily is in love and giving her virginity to a man she loves and trusts implicitly. She’s been dating Sculpt, the lead singer of a band and underground fighter, for months now. She’s looking forward to more time with him, to plans, to hope…

The next minute she wakes up in her own personal hell.

Kidnapped.
Starved.
Beaten.
I was alone and fighting to survive.
When I heard Sculpt’s voice, I thought he was there to save me.

I was wrong.

At this point of the story I was completely and utterly lost. It was a state of “what the fuck” and “what’s going on”, but I read on

And the plot just thickened.

Logan, or Sculpt, went from being her dream to her personal nightmare in just a blink of an eye and the crack of a whip.

I’m scared.”
Logan stared at me with eyes that were cold, dark, and without a spark of…anything.
“You should be.”

Nashoda Rose wrote a captivating story that gripped me from the very first chapter. You experience every feeling, tremor, and lost hope along with the heroine. You want Logan to turn out to be the good guy, for this all to be some sort of trick, but is it really?

You need to fear me, not hate me.”
I did. I feared him. But I think I hated him more. No. I knew I hated him more. For what he’d done. For what he was doing. For the betrayal. Most of all, for tarnishing something so beautiful and making it ugly.

Emily was a heroine that I should have by all intents and purposes been annoyed with, but yet something about her just clicked for me.

As for Logan? Well, not much I can tell you about him without giving anything away. But what I can tell you is that by the end of the book you would have fallen for him. Hard.

There is a strong distinction in the writing and feeling of the first and second half. The first half having a much darker and grittier feeling to it, while the second half is more emotional. What happens to lead from one to the other? I won’t tell you that. That’s something you have to read to find out.

This is not a dark romance, but precisely as the blurb says it’s a romance with dark elements in it. It will suck you in and keep you riveted to the pages until the very last one.

Nashoda Rose definitely has herself a new fan after finishing this book, and I cannot wait to find out what she has in store with the next one.

Writing style: 1st person POV (dual POV’s in the 2nd half)

A sexy category romance from Entangled’s Brazen imprint…

Trapped and tempted, this battle of wills rages all night long…

Kady Dresco and Colton Brooks click on a level that defies logic. There are only two problems. One, he’s her older brother’s irritating best friend, and two, they’re bidding on the same military security services contract. 

When the competition heats up, Colton is torn between wanting to strangle Kady (and her annoying brilliance) and kissing her into submission. Which is a bad idea for a million reasons, because Kady’s submission is exactly what he craves. Being trapped in a tiny motel room with the object of his darkest fantasies will require every ounce of his restraint.

Kady doesn’t want his restraint, but Colton knows better. She deserves love, marriage, and a white picket fence—three things Colton can’t give her. But her proximity and the memory of their steamy near-miss three years ago slowly destroys his resolve. And he’s not sure how much longer he can keep his hands off…or his heart closed.

Trapped and tempted, this battle of wills rages all night long…

It’s not often I’d rate a novella more than 4 stars. No really. It isn’t. True story. The biggest reason is I always have a hard time connecting to the story and the characters in just a few pages. The fact that this book managed to do just that AND leave me panting and salivating for the rest of the series? Well that my friends is a book worthy of 4.5 stars.

So let’s see, this book had:

Great story
If there’s anything I love more than a friends to lovers trope, it’s the brother’s best friend falls for younger sister. Yep. Always does it for me. Kady and Colton basically grew up together since Colton was her brother’s best friend. But he was also 6 years her senior, and off limits. Well…that is until he went off to the army and came back when Kady was 23 years old. So they finally gave in to the explosive chemistry between them…only for Colton to cut things off abruptly before things got REALLY good. He had his reasons, but Kady doesn’t need to know them. Now 3 years have gone by and the way they deal with that night? Well, Colton has one way of making it work

Since he couldn’t give in to what he really wanted from Kady Dresco, he picked on her and snarked at her and genreally gave her grief. And she gave it right back. Sometimes he thought they were engaged in one long round of mental foreplay.

I’d have to agree with you there, Colton. Those barbs and insults were pretty much laden in sexual tension and innuendos

Plus I loved that Kady could dish it as well as take it. She had a bit of sass to her that I really liked.

Hot hero?

Any questions?

Sexy as hell dirty talk?

You aren’t getting my cock until you come again. I want you to come so hard my whole hand is wet with it.”

Did I also happen to mention that Colton likes things on the rough and forceful side? Oh I didn’t? Well now you know. You’re welcome.

Awesome heroine?
Some verra rough and spicy hot lovin? and

My only complaint? I wish it was longer. What a perfect novella to start off what seems to look like an AWESOME new series with a bang. Pun most definitely intended. I can’t wait to get my pervy little hands on the next book in the series.

If you’re looking for a quick and verra steamy read that will entertain you, leave you hot and bothered and begging for more…Why are you still reading my review?

**ARC courtesy of publisher in exchange for an honest review**

Even amid falling leaves

She was brighter

Than the summer sun

Fell under the spell of her

Smiling brown eyes

Faster than a breath

And when she’s gone

It’s always night

And I’m under a bleak moon

A bleak, bleak moon

I used to love all things New Adult, but lately it’s become harder and harder to find a book that stands out and doesn’t blend in with all the rest. You know what I’m talking about, it’s the NA recipe; you start with angst, throw in a dash of sexual tension, a dollop of melodrama, perhaps a pinch of stupid childish miss-communication, then top it all off with a bad boy hero and the good girl (possibly virginal) heroine that shouldn’t fall for him but does. Sound familiar? I bet it does. And this is exactly why I love this series and this author. Does it have some of those things? Sure. But Jean Haus manages to take a story that maybe may have been done before and throw her own unique spin on it, that I can’t really compare it to any other books I’ve read. My favorite thing about it is the way she’s able to fuse these books with music. I had my own soundtrack playing in my head as I was reading it. This is quickly becoming my go to NA series when I’m pretty much guaranteed a book that I will enjoy.

This story finally gives us a lot more insight on the reclusive and troubled bassist, Sam. Luminescent Juliet gets the opportunity of a lifetime when they’re offered to join a national tour. But then Sam gets a blast from the past in the shape of a blonde he hoped to never see again, Peyton.

Peyton is not exactly thrilled to see Sam again either. She doesn’t exactly have the fondest memories of their past. But when she’s offered to chronicle the band’s tour, it’s not an opportunity she can turn her back on. No matter how much she dreads seeing Sam or having to think about what happened that have made them hate each other.

There’s certainly no love lost between these two. But beneath their constant barbs and insults brews something…more. What starts out as hate, disdain, and loathing soon starts blurring into an undeniable attraction.

But can Sam and Peyton get over their past in order to deal with their future? You’ll have to read to find out.

Telling you anything else would be spoiling the book for you, and I’d recommend reading it without reading many reviews in order to truly appreciate it. I can tell you that when the truth of what happened those years ago comes to life…well, it was the last thing I saw coming.

I simply couldn’t put this book down. I was hooked from the very first chapter and got more and more drawn in with each new page. I love that Miss Haus made you really understand the characters and their past before she allowed the chemistry between them to truly shine through. It just made me all that more invested in their relationship. As much as I wanted to hate Peyton (since i think this would have been exactly the case in any other book), I simply couldn’t. Her struggle was evident, and you can see how much she grew in the short span of the story.

Sam. Sam is that bad boy that completely broke my heart. God I loved him. Yet my heart hurt for him at the same time. He was just perfection. The author took a subject manner that I haven’t seen in many books and wrote a brilliant story about love, loss, and learning to move on. It was a fantastic read with just the little amount of steam to make it that much better.

I loved catching up with the rest of the band, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll be seeing Gabe’s book next.

If you’re a fan of well written NA rock star romances, I highly recommend this one. While it can easily be read as a standalone, I’d recommend reading in order since it makes you appreciate each character that much more. Plus they’re great books. What more reason do you need?

He thought I owned him. He thought he loved me, that I was enough. But this animal, this sex god who could drive me crazy and steal my heart in the same breath, he would never be full mine. It was impossible. No one ever owned a god.

If there’s one thing that I am absolutely convinced of after finishing this book, is that Alessandra Torre can write. I mean, she can write. Her writing is always able to wring a multitude of feelings and emotions from me, and this book was the perfect conclusion to an amazing trilogy.

If you have not read the first two books, DO NOT read this review. It will contain spoilers of the previous books but I will try not an revealing anything important from this one.

End of the Innocence takes off right where book two left off. Brad and Julia are now engaged and planning a wedding. But the threat of being engaged to the son of one of the biggest mafia families in town is still looming over Julia’s head. Brad knows that he will do anything to protect her. You can literary feel his love for Julia flowing through every page. Alessandra has a gift for combing equal parts of eroticism and pure emotion in her books, and this was no different here.

It’s not all sunshine and butterflies for these two however. Not everyone is happy about their engagement or supportive of it. Julia has to deal with the fallback not only from the office, but from her friends and family as well. But that doesn’t slow down their sex life in the least.

Julia really grows into her own as the woman that is meant to be by Brad’s side. I loved that Alessandra stayed true to her characters and didn’t all of a sudden make them a purely vanilla couple that no longer enjoys the thrill of adding a third person to the mix. This book was probably the hottest of the 3 as far as the steam went. Brad doesn’t hold back and Julia is certainly no wilting wallflower when it comes to taking what she wants. I have 2 words for you: Brad’s birthday. You’ll see what I mean.

But try as you might to sit back and enjoy this couple finally finding a sort of normalcy in their relationship, there’s a layer of dread that hangs over your head the entire time. The prologue of this book sets a dark undertone, but you don’t know when it will happen. I spent the entire time reading sitting on pins and needles waiting for that shoe to drop and all hell to break loose. You’re kept guessing the entire time. I think that this really added to the book as a whole, as I don’t think I would have been quite as drawn to the story otherwise.

As for the ending…well I definitely won’t be giving anything away. I can tell you that I struggled a little with how I felt about it. On the one hand I wished for things to be more resolved and to have a bit more closure on certain things. On the other hand, I can understand that to wrap it up in a perfect little bow would not have been true to the characters or realistic as a story. There was a wonderful epilogue and I highly recommend reading the bonus scene that the author includes for that additional icing on top.

Alessandra Torre is a new author who focuses on contemporary erotica. Her first book, Blindfolded Innocence, was published in July 2012, and was an Erotica #1 Bestseller for two weeks. The sequel to Blindfolded, Masked Innocence, will be released in February 2014.

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THE IMPACT

Tristan hit rock bottom, and no one felt the impact harder than Danika. She was forced to see, in the most brutal of ways, that love does not conquer all. Bruised, bloody, and broken she had to walk away.

THE AFTERMATH

Picking up the pieces of your life after a tragedy is a daunting prospect, and that’s considering you still own all of the pieces. But what if you don’t? What if someone else owns those pieces, and those pieces are a part of your soul?

You dig deep and work with what you’ve got. 

That’s what Danika told herself and believed, every single day, for years. 

Tristan and Danika’s love had failed every test that life had thrown at them. She couldn’t forget that, not for one second. And if those tests had been overly harsh, well, she wasn’t one to wallow in self-pity. The failure was the thing she had to focus on. The failure was the lesson. She had no intention of working so hard to make it out of hell without learning that lesson well. 

He’d set me adrift, so very long ago, and I had wandered into deepest waters, with depths far too vast for me to navigate alone.
And here he was, swimming out to save me. Had he been following me all the while? Had I been so blind?

What a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. It was emotional, angsty, erotic, everything you would want in a book. I waited until book 3 was out to read the 2nd and ended up reading them back to back.

In Lovely Trigger we find Danika slowly begin to pick up the pieces of her broken heart and shattered dreams. She has a job at James Cavendish’s art gallery, and while she can’t dance anymore, she gets by. As much as she tries to move on emotionally, she can never seem to fully forget the man that will always hold her heart.

I convinced myself that it had all been passion, not true love.  True love was a myth, a misdirection from the solid things in life.  What I’d felt for Tristan had been big and all consuming, but I told myself, like a mantra in my head, that it had never been solid.   Even so, every little thing brought him to mind.  We’d had too much together, been through too much, felt too much, and every feeling had a memory.

She tries to move on, but no one ever compares to Tristan.

Tristan is dealing with his own demons. After hitting rock bottom, he’s slowly but surely trying to climb his way out. He’s gotten clean, a job as a magician in the Cavendish casino, but still the memory of Danika haunts him. He’s riddled with guilt; for the things that he remembers and the things that he doesn’t recall from his drugged out haze. Just reading about everything he went through after what happened in book 2 hit me right in the feels

I didn’t trust myself, Danika. I needed my sobriety. I’m nothing without it, and you were a lovely trigger for me.  That look in your eyes, after all that I’d done…The way you looked at me like I was scum and knowing that I deserved all of your antipathy. I knew that if you looked at me like that again, I’d hit rock bottom, and this time I wouldn’t come back from it.”

I kept waiting for their reunion, knowing that when these two cross paths it will be explosive. And holy shit was it!

The world stopped as we took what we needed, what I’d been starved for since the very last time I’d been in his arms.   It was a frenzied mating, a swift coming together that took me to the fever pitch of ecstasy with a few rough, heavy strokes, over too soon, the perfect testament to our torrid love affair.

I loved the way that Tristan works to get back into Danika’s heart again. You can feel his pain and heartache through the pages. As much as I wanted to hate him after the end of book 2, my heart went out to him. That’s the beauty of a book written in dual first person POVs.

Love doesn’t let you walk away clean. Love is messy. I don’t have to tell you, of all people; Love takes a fucking piece of you before it’s done.”

There was plenty of things stacked against them; their past, the secrets Danika still keeps, and their present. On a side note, Mona…

This was not as angsty as book 2, thankfully, but still packed a hell of a punch.

(Highlight to view spoilers)[When Danika finally reveals everything that happened that night to Tristan and reading his reaction? Gut-wrenching. (hide spoiler)]
(When Danika finally reveals everything that happened that night to Tristan and reading his reaction? Gut-wrenching.)

But then there was that ending. Perfection. Not gonna lie, it brought a tear to my cold and black little heart. It was that good.

Why not 5 stars?
There were some things that I wanted a little more resolution for. I’m a picky bitch, what can I do?
(After everything that happened with Danika and her sister, I wanted to see what happened with their relationship. I don’t remember her being mentioned after that whole Tristan fiasco. I loved that she had her half-brother now, but some resolution with Dahlia would have been great.)[After everything that happened with Danika and her sister, I wanted to see what happened with their relationship. I don’t remember her being mentioned after that whole Tristan fiasco. I loved that she had her half-brother now, but some resolution with Dahlia would have been great. (hide spoiler)]

Aside from that very minor thing, I loved the book. Trilogies are not something I read as I tend to grow bored with the same couple after 2 books. TO be honest, when I saw that there was going to be 3 books instead of the 2 that I had assumed, I almost didn’t read it. (I blame my book ADD) But after reading these books I can definitely understand the necessity of it being stretched into 3. The story would not have been the same in just 2 books. Considering that this is my 2nd trilogy that I finished, it tells you something. If you love angsty, emotional, break-your-heart-then-put-it-back-together-with-a-cherry-on-top love stories, you need to read this.

The man was sinful. It wasn’t just the looks that made him dangerous, it was the cocky confidence that dominated every move, every touch. And the frustrating yet ecstatic fact about the whole package was that he could back it all up… 

Julia Campbell never knows what to expect with win-at-all-costs Brad De Luca. And she’s starting to like it that way. She gave up safe, conventional relationships when she let the elite divorce attorney seduce her into his world. Now that he’s determined to strip her naked of every inhibition, she’s in danger of falling too deep and too fast. 

But their affair begins to feel even more dangerous when a murder leaves a trail of suspicion that points straight to the mob…and Brad. Trusting a man with a bad reputation and a past full of secrets seems like a mistake. But when she’s forced to make a choice, the consequences will take her further than she could ever have imagined.

I fell for the feisty, smart-ass Julia that calls me on my shit. But I’m owned by the vixen that you become behind closed doors.

If you haven’t yet read Blindfolded Innocence, do not read my review. There’s no spoilers for this book, but there will be spoilers of book 1. You’ve been warned 😉

Masked Innocence starts immediately where Blindfolded Innocence ends. Julia and Brad are together, but keeping the relationship a secret. Brad has taken Julia completely out of her comfort zone in her sexuality, but she’s reveling in it. She’s finding out that she’s not quite the good girl she thought herself to be.

I should have felt like a slut, a dirty whore. But instead I felt liberated, aroused. It was an interesting discovery, to know that I liked being dirty. I wanted to be stared at, pointed to, to have men lining up to fuck me. Inside, I felt a release of some tie, some leash undone, and I knew my descent into sexual awareness was just now starting.

Good thing, Julia, since Brad’s kink is to swing.

While this book had a good share of it’s steamy moments, it was a much different feel in comparison to book one. With the murder of one the law firm’s partner, we get a sense of intrigue and suspense. Julia has the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and asking too many questions, and now her life hangs in the balance. Who is threatening her life? And just who is Brad De Luca?

The man I had turned to was the one I should have run from. I didn’t know what bothered me more, the new danger facing my body or the risk I had brought to my heart.

Brad is determined to protect Julia at all cost, even his own life. But that certainly doesn’t stop him from having her anywhere he can. There was kitchen sex, masked party menage sex, office sex…

Well you get the idea here…

Julia and Brad’s relationship continues to evolve into something deeper. Brad finds himself doing something that he never imagined himself doing; falling for her. And you know what they say? The bigger they are…

I did’t want a relationship! Didn’t want to (view spoiler)[fall in love (hide spoiler)] or be committed, or be required to share the intimate details of my life! But I’m here- with you, a curse of a woman who has taken all my fucking walls and shredded them like fucking tissue paper in your tiny little hands!

As much as I love Brad, I really love Julia’s sassy personality. I found her to be his perfect match. She really gave as good as she got

To the most wonderful woman I have ever met. May we spend the rest of our lives together.
“That’s your toast?”
“You don’t approve?”
As I’m sure you have figured out by now, I have a very healthy self-esteem, bordering on egotism.”
“Bordering on?”
“Shut up. Regardless, you have been with a disgusting amount of women, and will be with a hundred more before you die. For me to be the ‘most wonderful’ woman you have ever met, and you toasting to ‘spending the rest of your life’ with me rings a little…”
“Fake?”
“Bullshitty.”

The book leaves off in a HFN-ish type ending, but there is still danger looming in the future. I’m looking forward to the conclusion of Julia and Brad’s story and seeing what the future has in store for them.