This third installment in the series brings together some of those very things that we love in a romance – passion, mis-trust, mis-guided confidences, anxiety, sarcasm/humor and high intelligence.  It’s that balance between passion, intelligence, and sassiness that i have found the author to have really honed the skill at.

Xavier is the owner of Dark Havena BDSM club in San Francisco that we were introduced to in earlier stories in the series.  I don’t believe we’ve met him before so that was a nice twist.  He’s got all the traits that we’ve come to expect from our brooding males – a sexuality that rolls off his body and makes every woman (and some men) cower around him and wish to do his bidding just for some attention.  He’s clearly VERY intelligent which is really nice to see – and his past has onlly shaped him.  Cherise Sinclair even managed to give him a profession outside the club that falls in line with the ‘giving back to community’ that she did with Master Z in the Shadowlands series.

Abby finds herself ag Dark Haven because of a few different circumstances.  Her boyfriend breaks up with her because she’s just too vanilla for him, and he’s been part of the BDSM lifestyle for a while – actually being a member of Dark Haven himself.  She also has concerns about her job as a professor – knowing that they are doing lay-offs and that she needs to get published ASAP in order to try to keep her job.  so all that together puts quite the innocent into the club – into a world that she doesn’t know was made for her.

So we’re drawn into the introduction of Abby to the world of BDSM where she doesn’t know the protocol and doesn’t quite grasp what needs to be done to be proper.  She is more focused on trying to understand what’s going on for the members around her, what makes the lifestyle click and even what the similarities are among other communities and things of that sort.  She’s so interested in trying to write her paper that she almost misses what’s right in front of her face and is quite possibly the best thing that could have happened for her.

we have another main character that isn’t the stick thin model which is a big issue for her.  what we know though from all these series is that our favorite doms tend to prefer a bit of curve to their women so Abby has everything that her ‘liege’ seems to like.  The question is will she ever feel good enough about herself to get comfortable in the lifestyle?

so after many twists and turns in this story, we find ourselves dealing with relationship conflicts, cattiness and lots of ‘funishment’ and repentance.  it’s one of Sinclair’s better stories i have to say that i didn’t even want to put it down to go to sleep.