Oh how i love a good novella series – especially when i’ve found that ALL of the books in the series are out and i don’t have to wait for the next installment to come.  I feel though like a lot of these are the same, yet some how i keep coming back to read more.

so, we meet Kate 2 years after she’s run from her first dom/sub relationship with Matt.  She clearly didn’t know what she was getting into when she got into a relationship with him, and found that she was quite the submissive, loved it but didn’t want to.  Due to a series of bad circumstances at a party, she goes running, thinking 1 thing as a cause, Matt thinks another – gets really hurt and well…we fast forward 2 years into the future.

Kate has re-established her life, career and friendships and is on her weekly shopping trip to the mall when she sees a man that she’s fairly certain in Matt.  this sends her in a tailspin since she doesn’t want to see him, she still has these unresolved feelings for him yet the circumstances that caused her to run are still quite tangible.

Matt of course is our incredibly sexy male lead – who’s the head of a major tech corporation – very successful and the epitome of what a dom should be.

At this point in Kate’s life, things started to settle until her business partner decides to move, causing Kate to find herself in a struggle where she needs to find a new investor in her company or else it goes under.  while she’s dealing with that stress, it turns out that it WAS matt who came across her path, and he’s trying to get a moment of her time to find out what went wrong.

so…fast forward another month, and Kate is dealing with a last ditch effort to get financing and agrees to meet with an unknown investing firm which turns out to be owned by none other than matt.

so..this is where things go from being stressful at a level 6 to being a full on level 20.  They clearly still have chemistry, and sexual desires for each other that are not to be sated.  there’s quite a bit of tension though since Kate is angry for what Matt did to her, and Matt doesn’t quite know what Kate is mad about.  So the next 5 installments take us down a path of trying to figure out who you can trust, which stories that are being told to each are true, if there’s enough sexual chemistry and love in a dom/sub relationship to make things work, and all the while we at least get to enjoy some delicious sex imagery.

Opal does a nice job keeping us centered around these characters while they are in the moment, while at the same time doesn’t do quite enough to really develop the psychological relationship between them.  Ellen (Kate’s neighbor) does a decent job of trying to lay the groundwork for us to understand Kate a bit more, but we never quite get there with Matt since we have ZERO idea what brought him into this lifestyle and what he found to be so alluring about Kate to begin with. (aside from her response about liking powerful men)

in any event, it was a nice way to spent my Monday afternoon – reading these 200 pages or so of novellas.