review: Bound Temptations by Shiloh Walker

Bound Temptations by Shiloh Walker

May 1, 2012

Hydra Publications 

Adult | Erotica

Standalone

Source/Format: Netgalley/egalley

Pages: 269

Rating: ★★★

Print edition of two previously released ebooks, TEMPT ME and BEG ME

TEMPT ME
She’s a temptation he can’t resist…

Roxanne ‘Rocki’ Monroe’s life is full of secrets and hidden heartaches. Cole Stanton would love to heal her pain and chase away the ghosts of her past, but she’s just a complication he doesn’t have room for in his life.

Or so he thinks.

It doesn’t take Cole long to realize he’s more than willing to let temptation get the best of him, more than happy to deal with complications if that’s what it takes to get her.

What he has and what he needs are two different things…and what he needs is Rocki.

BEG ME
Beg me…there had been a time when those words made her burn with desire. But now, there was only fear.

Once, Tania Sinclair’s life was almost perfect…But a couple of tragedies later, she’s barely holding it together. A car accident took away her husband, and an attack from somebody she should have been able to trust has shaken not only her confidence, but it’s also stripped away her fantasies and even made it painful to look back on her memories of her husband without fear.

Two years after her attack, Tania is determined to take her life back and the first step is taking back herself…her fantasies, her dreams, her memories. There’s only one person she can trust to do it, too. One person she wants enough…Drake Bennett, her husband’s best friend.

Warning: This book involves light bondage play, rape fantasy & role-playing. The acts between the hero & heroine are consensual, but they may not be ideal for all readers…

REVIEW:

Bound Temptations by Shiloh Walker contains two novellas previously released, TEMPT ME and BEG ME. Both are erotic romances and while they don’t contain the same characters, or even the same world, they work well together in this print copy.

With Tempt Me, which I rather liked, I had one big problem: why did Cole fall for Rocki? They see each other and BAM, insta-connection. And Cole is engaged to another person, so to me it felt really awkward for him to break his engagement and start falling in love with Rocki; and it all happens so fast my brain whirled. I honestly am still reeling from how fast those two fell for each other. And I still don’t have any clue why they did fall for each other. 

I liked that little bit of danger—Rocki’s ex stalking her—because it added SOMETHING to this so it wasn’t all romance. So that it wasn’t all boring. That isn’t to say the romance was boring, because it wasn’t, but had it just been romance it would have boring after a while. And the stalking really tied Tempt Me to Beg Me.

In Beg Me, Tania is attempting to reclaim her sexuality. Her husband’s twin brother raped her because he knew she liked rape fantasies, and ever since then, she’s had a hard time being sexually active because she DOES like rape fantasies, she likes it rough. So she asks her (late) husband’s best friend to help her out with it. 

And that is where it went down the hill for me. For starters, I don’t mind BDSM erotica—at all (I mean, I love The Siren by Tiffany Reisz), but Beg Me was SO AWKWARD for me. Tania says she doesn’t like BDSM, but she likes it rough (okay) but then it dives into territory I am not comfortable in: Drake calling her his “little slut” and “little bitch” and while that gets Tania hot, it makes me cringe so, so hard because there already IS slut-shaming in the world . . . and it was just uncomfortable for me. 

Every time her and Drake would have sex, it was awkward for me because of what they both like. So really it’s just a personal preference for me; while it made me rather uncomfortable to read Beg Me (despite having wanting to read it for a while now), I know some readers will highly enjoy both of these stories and how well flow together. And hey, maybe somebody will find the sex scenes in Beg Me hot. ;)