Recommendation paragraph

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This story is explosive”

~ Under the Covers

I’ve always been a big fan of Cara McKenna so I didn’t even read that this book was about before I accepted it. I was pleased to realized that this book is about a married couple. Samira and Mike are happily married, and I should stress again that they are madly in love with each other….it’s just that Mike has a particular kink that complicates their relationship a bit.

Mike is a cop, a person of authority in his day job but he has this deep interest in degradation and more specifically, feeling like the lesser man. So he and his wife have come up with this role-playing activity that involves her pretending to be with another man before she comes home to him. They act like it’s a real problem when it fact, it turns Mike’s crank up so high, he pretty much loses his mind. It’s not a kink that I’ve ever encountered before so kudos for McKenna for coming up with that. However, I will say that I didn’t find it 100% believable the entire time.

The story starts to get even hotter when Samira suggests they invite a real man into her bed, someone who can play the cocky bastard Sam is cheating on Mike with while he watches in the background. It’s an idea that makes Mike burn so Samira sets it up, sagging a man named Bern who seems like a real catch. McKenna takes her time making sure that all parties are on the same page. Communication and understanding that the other person wants is key to this novel so I liked that she took the time. But that being said, it can also dragged down the story a bit and remove some of the passion that was already there.

Nevertheless, this story is explosive. When all three get together, there’s a real power dynamic that occurs between all parties involved. There’s some light M/M action that I enjoyed too.

For me the issues really lay in the fact that you have three people here who want something out of this arrangement and while everyone does their best to try and give what the other two want, it’s obvious that conflict will arise when someone doesn’t get what they want or they feel left out. There’s no outright cheating in this book, but there’s one scenes where there’s a bond forms between Bern and Samira. They realize it and Sam tells Mike about it. All this kind of felt predictable to me. What I didn’t know was how McKenna was going to come back from it. The ending is a little too swift for my liking but I am curious enough to read more of this series.

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