I bought this book because I am a fan of Lora Leigh's "Breeds" series. I've read several of her other books and some of her shorter stories published in anthologies like this one and picked up this book to read over a few days when I knew I would have some time to kill. Of the three stories, I actually preferred the last one, by Ms. Garnier, rather than Ms. Leigh's latest offering. I'll review each story individually below. WARNING: May contain some mild spoilers.
Lora Leigh's "Sheila's Passion"
What can I say? The story begins with a rather cryptic prologue that, I assume, sets up this tale as the beginning of a series. Apparently, a villain is stalking one Beauregard Fredrico, a man who rejected his status as the heir to what I understood to be an Italian mafia family(?) and disappeared, assuming a new identity. The villain is watching the Hero, Nick Casey, to determine if Nick is, in fact, Beau in disguise.
Nick Casey is a retired Special Ops soldier who is now a member of a "Homeland Security" type operations group and working undercover in a Texas bar where he, along with fellow team members, spy on questionable types that hang out at the bar. Sheila is the daughter of the leader of the Homeland Security type group and Nick's love interest. She picks up the classified data collected by the group members at the bar and carries the info back to her Dad at his home/office.
To get it out of the way, I will say that Leigh's story is, again, plagued by sloppy editing errors. For example, Sheila is lusting over Nick in his jeans and short sleeved denim shirt when they meet in an office to exchange the data collected at the bar that evening. They have "words" of sorts and she leaves the office to return to her car in the parking lot, but Nick is "hot" on her heels, literally and figuratively. Outside the back door of the bar, Nick suddenly has on a white dress shirt which Sheila clutches as Nick clutches Sheila's <ahem> . . . At another point, the couple has wild monkey sex on his desk in his office in the bar and then avail themselves of a quick shower in the attached bathroom. Once they get out of the shower, they return to the bedroom . . . This problem is NOT as bad as it has been in some of her recent novels (e.g., missing PAGES in one of the recent Breeds books), but it is still jarring to the reader and, in my opinion, completely inexcusable.
Other reviewers have talked about Sheila's less than endearing personality. I don't see her as unlovable so much as she, and Nick, are hopelessly dense and juvenile. They each condemn the other for "playing games" but both of them are guilty of it. She wants more than just a "friends with benefits" relationship with him, so she leaves his bed immediately after about 17 pages of hot sex, refusing to tell him why she's upset and on her way out the door because "he should know why." Nick swears he's clueless and wants her to tell him, saying she knows where he is when she wants to tell him what's wrong. THEN, he decides he wants more than a "friends with benefits" relationship with her, but won't tell her what he wants from her, even though she asks repeatedly, telling her that she's playing games and that she should already know. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!! Someone needs to slap them both upside the head. Both are too dumb to live, let alone end up happily with each other.
Finally, although I realize people read Lora Leigh's books for the plot about as frequently as men subscribe to Playboy for the articles, Leigh's storyline in this book is extremely weak. She is capable of a better tale than this -- witness some of the Breed books -- but this one seems to be contrived solely to string together descriptions of several hot and heavy sexual encounters between the two main characters, descriptions Ms. Leigh excels at, I admit, but they can border on p*rn when divorced from context provided by characterization and a back history on the relationship involved. (Sort of like movie stars who justify nude scenes by saying they were necessary to the plot of the film rather than gratuitous.) I prefer more story than Leigh's provided here. Even in the shorter novella format, the reader is entitled to more. It's unclear here that Sheila's passionate about anything more than Nick's "package."
McCray's "Deadly Dance"
This one really left me lukewarm. The writing is not bad. It's just that the story has been done before -- often. Beautiful ballerina is stalked by criminal ex-lover because she testified against him and put him in prison. He's out of jail now, on a technicality, and he's bent on revenge. Enter a cop, whose partner was killed by the ex-lover during his crime spree. Cop falls for ballerina as he protects her. As my youngest son would say, "Meh." That sums it up for me.
Garnier's "Caught"
This one was a cut above the other two for me. There were some plot contrivances that struck me as just too convenient, but I was willing to let them slide given this was a novella and needed to be brought to resolution relatively quickly. The story involves an "evil twin" of the Hero. The author surprised me when she allowed the heroine to mistake the evil twin for her love interest at one point! That NEVER happens in my experience of romance novels, and I read a LOT of them.
In sum, don't buy this book. Check it out of the library or borrow it from an unfortunate friend, like me, who paid for the privilege (NOT!) of owning the volume. It will entertain a bit, but it is definitely and easily forgettable once you reach The End.
