What I Am Reading ~ A. D. Christopher: Necessary Temptation

Necessary Temptation by A. D. Christopher
From: Ellora’s Cave

Only one night of sexual testing stands between Dawson Gray and his destiny. If he can endure a public ritual without succumbing to his desire for another man, he will claim his female mate and his future as head of his wereleopard pride. That future is in his grasp, until one man approaches…

Logan is an Unfree slave whose only chance at freedom is to become the warrior-mate of a Pride-born son. But there’s one thing Logan desires more than his freedom — Gray. This is his only chance to tempt the man he loves to his side. He’ll use every weapon at his disposal to prove to Gray that their feelings are more than desire, and that this night is the beginning of a shared destiny, not merely a necessary temptation.

I think I saw this pose on A Nightmare on Elm Street. His ear looks like a bite size cinnamon roll.

What I Am Reading ~ Anne Douglas: Accidentally Were?

Accidentally Were? by Anne Douglas
From: Loose-Id

Pearl Gordon wakes up after her first ever one-night stand to an empty bed, a plethora of love bites, and every stray canine in town serenading her bedroom window. Something’s not right — neither the dogs, nor the strange canine tooth marks in the middle of all the hickeys she now wears around her neck make any sense.

When her pal Shaun can’t come up with any better excuse than she was bitten by a werewolf — seriously, as if! — Shaun suggests Pearl double check with her neighbor, Rex Dixon. After all, the handsome, burly, bear of a man might be practicing as a vet, but he also trained as a GP.

Angry that a Were in heat was so stupid as to sit herself down in the middle of his waiting room, Rex reacts. Only there’s a few things he doesn’t know about Pearl, and it seems Magic is about to poke a pin in the side of his confirmed bachelor balloon. There’s a prophecy to fulfill and Fate’s out hunting, and she’s loaded for Were-Bear. When Miss Priss in pearls meets Mr. Proudly Plaid in flannel, there’ll be more flying than just blue sparks and fur.

What I Am Reading ~ J.M. Snyder: Beneath A Yankee Sky

Beneath A Yankee Sky by J.M. Snyder
From: Amber Quill Press

Brance Brenneman is used to harsh conditions—the eldest son of a stern Amish preacher, Brance was bit by a werecat as a young boy, and managed to keep his secret from his family until he was old enough to leave them and their religion behind. Years later, when the nation is divided by the American Civil War, Brance finds himself enlisted in the Union army. By sheer chance, he meets Caleb Chilson, a Confederate soldier who bears his same shapeshifting burden.

Together they leave the war behind to forge a new life in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. But trappers near their camp are hunting bobcats, and they don’t much care if Brance and Caleb are only in the fur part of the time. Brance finds his peaceful existence shattered, and he has to fight to defend the life—and the bobcat, the man—he’s come to love.

Buffi BeCraft-Woodall: Weremones

Weremones by Buffi BeCraft-Woodall
From: New Concepts Publishing

The intense stare never wavered, making her search for something else to say.
Excuses, excuses, excuses, her conscience taunted. Chicken.
“I mean, I only started dating again. And look how that turned out.”

“I told you ….” Adam was eerily patient. He reached to pull her into his embrace. She stopped him, pushing against his chest. She couldn’t help but feel how nice it was under her hands.
Slut! Her conscience screamed. Every man in the house was not fair game.
Yes they are! Her hormones rallied.
“No. Keep your hands to yourself. You didn’t want me to date anyone.”
“No, not anyone. Just me.”

She huffed a breath and told her hormones to shut up. She’d been stabbed. She didn’t need to roll around on the mattress.
“You are so aggravating. Why me? I don’t want to be involved. Why not find a nice wolven girl to bother?”
Adam tried to process what Diana was saying. He wanted her trust so that she’d agree to do the mate’s bond. She probably wouldn’t appreciate him doing Richard Ridley bodily harm, or rapping some sense into that kid of hers either. It was getting idiotic to claim that neither she nor Mack were pack. Or Karen. The boys worshipped the ground the Ridley females walked on. And whether she admitted it or not, Diana doted on the boys. She loved them. Adam saw and felt that plainly though the pack bond.
Adam rubbed at his breastbone with the heel of one hand. He sucked in a breath of the thinning air in the room.
Trust. It all came down to trust. There was so little in his pack, he was falling victim to the effects. He hardened his resolve. Adam J. Weis was no victim.

“Adam?” Diana’s soft question brought him back to the present. Adam looked down and studied her pretty face for a moment. She had so much love to give. Selfish him, he wanted it all. He gave her a half smile before wiping his
damp hands on his jeans.
“I haven’t given you a chance. I’ve bullied and pushed at you to get what I want. Just as you haven’t given me one.” He waved at her to let him finish, his nervous steps taking him back and forth across the room. He was going out on a limb, like he’d never done before.

“Hear me out. All right?” He took a breath.
“I came here last year, looking for my fiancée, Amanda. Garrick and his pack killed her.” He held up a hand before she could interrupt. “Before you get upset, let me tell you that most wolven matings are arranged. It was all worked out long before Amanda and I met.” He looked at her for reassurance that she hadn’t completely closed from him.
Diana nodded again.

“Anyway, Garrick was a sick bastard. He did … bad things to the pack, to the boys.”
“I know. Don’t explain, please.” Her voice held a combination of anger and sorrow.
“Someone here tipped off my pack in Tarrant. So I came to find her.”
He stopped to look out the window, hands shoved in his back pockets.
“I did, eventually. Her skin was nailed to a wall, in his basement, the scent of violence and sex still on her fur.”

Diana shuddered. So much of their short relationship involved violence.
There was a mix of anger, grief, and guilt that churned in him.
“They raped and killed your fiancée. What did you do?”
“I didn’t love her. It was all arranged.” He recovered old ground. Guilt swamped him, then anger. “I killed them. I was supposed to report back. But I killed them because they touched what was mine. And because I found out what was happening to the boys.” To Brandon, but he didn’t want to go into that story. He’d pretended to be a stray
so that Garrick would allow him close enough to snoop. He’d snooped all right and found both Amanda’s pelt and the violated child in the same basement. After that Garrick and the pack wardens were as good as dead. They just didn’t know it. The sick bastards were supposed to be protecting the pack from harm, not causing it.

“Reporting back to Paul, my Pater Canis, was a technicality. I knew Paul would give the okay to clear them out. “
He looked back at the bed to gauge her reaction.
“Only he didn’t. He called it a duel for ascendancy and wouldn’t let me come back. Someone else was moved to the beta spot.”
His half-brother Dom, the lawyer, got the beta spot. Adam’s laugh was dry, humorless. Dom, who Adam had challenged and beat for the position, was back at Paul’s side.
“A moving truck arrived a week later with my stuff.”

“I knew from the first that you were an alpha.”
“No.” Adam shook his head. “I was Paul’s beta warden. I protected the pack.”
Diana smiled at the lost tone. He didn’t realize how hurt he was that his old pack leader wouldn’t let him go home.
“I think you are confusing rank with personal power. I’d bet that you were already an alpha at heart when you showed up here. You were more than ready to be on your own and your old leader knew it.”

Adam considered her insight. A heaviness in his chest lightened. Maybe Paul had tossed him from the nest, so to speak, in the only way he knew how. Paul Sheppard was a sink or swim kind of guy.
“I thought that after I cleared out Garrick and his ilk, I’d take the boys back with me.”
“Instead, he worked out a way so that you were obligated to stay here. I think your title fits you, Father Wolf. I’d bet he thought so, too.”
“He’s my father.”
Her surprise prompted him to explain.
“He didn’t raise me. My mother married a man, a psychic, named William Weis. Will’s my dad. Paul Sheppard is …” Adam made a loopy gesture with one hand. He crossed back to the bed and sat on the edge. If he didn’t finish this he’d go insane.
“As proposals go, I’m sure this one sucks.” He took her hand.
“Listen before you say no again. You give us something that is missing. Hope, I think. The boys need someone who cares enough to make birthday cakes and cookies. To fuss at them when their clothes are wrinkled.”
He was right, the proposal sucked.
“You want me to be den mother to your pack? To ride herd on a bunch of teenage werewolves? That’s why you’re proposing?”
She pulled her hand free. Not that she’d have said yes anyway. But, well…it sucked big time. A girl wanted to know that her man wanted, needed her for himself.
“Hello? I don’t get furry. And I’m not likely to either any time soon. You might try negotiating for another of your kind.”
“You’re angry,” he said.
Damn skippy she was angry. Diana narrowed her eyes. She kept her jaw locked before she told him what to do with his proposal. She did not want to marry him. Den mother indeed.

Good lord! Have you ever felt like you just ran a triathlon after reading a book? Just look at this excerpt. It’s supposed to be the tender moment in the book where our hero tells the girl of his dreams his desire to be her mate. Unfortunately it gets distracted half way through and starts providing, for no reason I can determine, exposition on stuff we read earlier about Adam. I still can not figure out how any of it helped him in expressing his current intentions with Diana.

I really wanted to like this book. The hero Adam seemed very much the alpha with a heart of gold. He has proven he is all badass after having killed the bad guys that were abusing the cubs and had violently killed his ex-fiance but the big softy then went about raising this mangy group of disturbed teenage werewolves on his own. That was sort of a touching and unique and interesting story line and it immediately worked to grab my attention and buy all three books.

The author also went about world building with a vengeance creating the heroine Diana being this quirky psychic chick with a quirky psychic teenage daughter and Mack the quirky ex-military sidekick. Fun stuff, although I started to cringe with all the other were-whatever-characters. Why do people do that? Just a few were-animals per world keeps it magic and special… Too much and it is not special anymore.

The problem was Buffi did not know where to stop or how to edit. So we have here, from what I could tell, about two and a half major plot lines stuffed into one book.

There is Adam raising the cubs and meeting Diana and there is the coyote delinquents trying to confront and run off the young werewolf pack. That had potential to be different, not many stories about coming of age werewolf teenagers growing up in a pack. There was the old psycho greasy werewolf hunter putting our heroine and her daughter in danger. That might have been OK for a run of the mill short story but at least the characters are interesting. Then there was Mack, Adam’s human sidekick, who secretly wants to be a werewolf and the two stray biker wolves that show up out of nowhere wanting to join the pack and all the pack politics that Adam our hero has to deal with without blowing a gasket.

“I think it’s beginning to work.”
Karen’s worried gaze met his.
“She feels warmer.”
Karen’s hands fluttered over her mother’s face. She checked the chest wound before tearing off her blouse for a compress. This would work, she told herself. She’d seen it done before wolven injuries. She’d heard of one human, near dead, stabilized with wolven blood. It would work.

“Now what?”
Bradley wadded the stray’s coat up into a pillow and situated Ms. Ridley so that she wouldn’t choke any more than necessary when she started coughing out the blood in her lung.

Mack had had a hell of a time with the coughing, but the man’s lungs had only received minimal damage, Brandon remembered. Garrick’s claws had ripped open Mack’s abdomen, then he had nearly chewed his arm off at the shoulder. The man’s total recovery was due to Adam sharing his blood as soon as he saw the man lived. Then Adam continued treatment over the next couple of days because he couldn’t afford to give the psychic too much of his blood in case any of Garrick’s followers had escaped to regroup.

“I’ve got to deal with … him.” With his muzzle, Brandon indicated the dead man outside the car. “Won’t take long. Then we go.”

There is also several big confrontations, two happen at the same time, confusing actions and diffusing any chance of suspense building clearly towards any sort of goal. Was there really a justifiable need for Diana to have to be dramatically attacked and healed twice in one book? Was there a need to rehash the old psycho werewolf hunter plot on top of the big territorial challenge? You could see how the writer was running into problems when we kept switching between two separate confrontations going back and forth head hopping so badly it caused me to lose track of who was doing what to whom and where.

Oh and then I read the next book… WTF? I swear so much goes on between this book and that one (Diana’s daughter has already gone through a bad marriage.) that you will swear you missed a book. I spent most of it scratching my head wondering how much these people had changed that I did not understand and trying to catch all the explanations of what I missed.

This book and it’s sequels have some great potential, fun characters and lots of thought went into them in fact I keep thinking a great editor would make these books shine. I only wish the story was more simplified down to maybe two plots with an effort to focus on the struggle with the coyotes and this crazy pack of teenagers, not to mention their father Adam along with Mack and Diana.

Grade D for distracting and disappointing because there is so much here I really want to like.

J. M. Snyder: Under A Confederate Moon

Under A Confederate Moon by J. M. Snyder
From: Amber Allure

Slowly Brance lowered the gun. He crammed it into the waistband of his pants, a makeshift holster. Then he stepped up to Caleb and raised one hand to his face. Caleb flinched, but Brance only traced the curve of his jaw, then lifted his chin until they faced each other. Again, his eyes were unfathomable—Caleb wished it were night and they had changed, if only because then he knew what went on behind that pale gaze.

Tenderly Brand touched the dimple in Caleb’s chin.
“Don’t follow me,” he whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Caleb nodded quickly, eager to please; then Brance kissed him, his beard itchy against Caleb’s hairless chin. As that sure tongue licked into him again, Caleb’s eyes slipped shut and his hands went limp, the blanket falling in a heap at his feet. The touch on his face disappeared, followed by the mouth on his. He sighed and kept his eyes closed as he listened to the faint sounds of Brance slipping away into the woods.

It took the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, but Caleb finally stumbled upon his discarded shirt, halfburied in mud and covered with paw prints. He picked it up, shook it out the best he could, and slipped his arms into the shredded sleeves. The buttons were gone. Pulling it shut across his chest, he untied the blanket around his waist and tucked the shirt down, then reknotted the blanket. The shirt was cold and damp; the fabric stuck to his back, clammy in the shadows. He’d need to see the sutler about a new shirt when he got back to his camp—the major would pitch a fit if he saw Caleb wearing this rag.

As Caleb retraced his route from the previous evening, his mind inevitably circled back to Brance. Like a bad cold, Caleb couldn’t shake him. The man infected his thoughts; the memory of his hands and lips and mouth was a ghost that lingered to haunt Caleb’s skin. A big man, rugged, not the type Caleb normally liked, but there was something untouchable about him that dogged Caleb, something unattainable that promised pleasure and so much more, if only Caleb could catch hold of it. How easy would it be to lose himself in a man like that? To give himself up wholly to him? What would it be like to chase the moon and stars with Brance at his side? How fast would they run, how far would they go? Could they outrace this present strife, put their pasts behind them, and move into a future where their hearts and souls, human and animal both, became one?

Caleb Chilton is a Confederate Soldier fighting a losing war amongst the ranks and hiding a dangerous secret. Dangerous for him that is. Every month at the full moon he changes into a bobcat which is more than a little inconvenient in the middle of a war zone.

While out one full moon night dodging bullets from his own guys while in his bobcat suit he stumbles upon another bobcat. One that just so happens can talk just like he can. Brance, a Yankee as we will soon come to find out, is wounded. Caleb immediately wants to help Brance even if it is against the older bobcats wishes for him to do so. After a night of hunting for Brance and helping him recover, Caleb and Brance awake to a morning both human, nude and ready to find out more about each other in many different ways.

I have to admit short sweet and to the point stories like this one impress me. I like an author who is not out to write the next big series and who’s whole point seems to be to clearly express as economically as possible a single brief moment between two unique men. It spurs my own imagination when done right to fill in the blanks so to speak and makes me love the story even more for the chance to stretch myself while enjoying the finely focused text.

J. M. Snyder has written a nice wonderful short story of southern boy redneck love that totally makes up for the many other literary sins I have read this week. Thanks J.M. for making me believe that eBooks are still a place to find something small but very special that falls far outside of the typical attempts at over baked, over wrought, epics with questionable character motivations and cream filler rich novels full of stale angst. I for one enjoy the fact you simply made me smile at a really good delicious bite of a tale.

Bobcats, bite, tale, get it? Grade A

Renee Field: Love Me Wild

He stroked her wet opening with his fingers. Pebbling her nub until it hardened and ached, he watched with male satisfaction as her body reached the precipice and then got swept away.
“By the Saints, oh my, oh my, ohmymy…” panted Rowena, as she came.

*snicker*

Before he climaxed, he wanted her to join him, so he circled his hips, knowing the sensation would nudge her secret sensitive spot, while his cock screamed for release.
“Oh mymymy!” cried Rowena, arching up off the grass, to grip his back harder as she climaxed again and flew to her own pleasure.

*SNORT*

Freeing one of his hands, he once again stroked her opening. This time he plunged two fingers deep inside her so he could stroke and suck.
“Ohh, yes, oh yes, ohh, mymymy…”

*sputter* heh…HEH!

With his other hand, he pebbled her still sensitive nub into a state of frenzied desire.
“Tulon, stop…I can’t…oh mymy,” said Rowena, when he slightly pinched her nub between two fingers.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! cough cough ack! *crash*

You probably noticed that I didn’t say, “And now for something completely different,” just now. This is simply because, I am unable to appear in the show this week. Sorry to interrupt. - Random Monty Python Quote