Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE:  Wrapped in Leather

AUTHOR:  M.A. Church

PUBLISHER:  Dreamspinner Press

LENGTH:  210 pages

BLURB: To celebrate his decision to take the next step with his boyfriend Ian, Toshi Baylor plans a romantic evening at their favorite steak house. Toshi starts the special weekend with a bang by surprising Ian at home with lunch. There’s a bang all right, but it’s between Ian and another guy.

Jase Taylor’s auto repair shop and the BDSM club, Wrapped Up, keep him busy while he waits for Mr. Right, instead of Mr. Right Now. He’s a Dom, but playing with the club’s submissives isn’t providing the usual stress release. After a day from hell, he deserves a good meal at his favorite steak house.

Toshi and Jase find a mix-up with their reservations: a table for Baylor, not Taylor. When Toshi invites Jase to dine with him, they discover a mutual affection for leather and a shared belief that trust must be earned.

Before they can explore their common interests, Toshi suffers a series of attacks by vandals. Jase’s protective instincts kick in, but both wonder if it can lead to anything permanent.

REVIEW:  

Walking into his boyfriend’s house and finding said boyfriend ass deep in someone else’s…well, ass, was not how he wanted to go about popping the ‘moving in’ question.  But with a little revenge à la shrimp and determination to bury everything under a pile of high-grade steak, Toshi sets out to forget the horrible, no good, downright boring relationship with Ian.

When he has to fire a longtime employee for being drunk, belligerent, and having an alarming tendency to throw heavy objects around Jase’s car repair shop, Jase figures he deserves a good meal and some alone time.  Granted he has had far more ‘alone time’ than he has really wanted since his sub and boyfriend took himself off to greener pastures, but he can’t expect the Steak House to furnish him with a hot, kinky man as well as a hot meal.

When a mix-up lands them a table short, and a moment of daring lands them sharing a meal, Jase and Toshi find themselves caught up in something that might just feel like attraction.  But lust can only take them so far, and while Jase’s commands are all that Toshi has dreamed about, life is never more complicated than when he tries to live it at another man’s feet.

I always enjoy a good ol’ welcome-to-the-kink type story.  It is interesting to see how characters react to the wide range of BDSM lifestyles.  Be it hard-core or light play, there is something so very entrancing about the ideas of dominance and submission.  And I do enjoy being able to see both sides–though if I had to pick one, I’m a bit of a sucker for the subs.  Watching Toshi feel his way into Jase’s lifestyle was fun.  He doesn’t know a lot about what exactly he wants from Jase, but he has known for quite some time that he might just need it.  And he trust Jase to give it to him.  Even when ‘it’ is equal parts exciting, terrifying, and embarrassing.  This had to be my favorite part of the story (though hide-the-shrimp comes in a close second–and no, that is not a euphemism. Get your mind out of the gutter, people!).  While it is not very hard-core, it was hot, and felt perfect for where Jase and Toshi were in their relationship.

While not exactly my cup of tea, I did enjoy the whole mystery of who was targeting Toshi.  I probably solved it a little too fast for it to be completely enjoyable, but for a while it did keep me guessing.  Thankfully it wasn’t the most obvious, but I do have some issues with how it kind of just floundered at the end.  The whole book is wrapped up in this idea that someone wants to hurt Toshi, but when it comes down to it, the bad guy just kind of…disappears.  It was rather anticlimactic.  I get that avoiding the whole confront-the-villain cliché was a nice twist, but without replacing it with some other type of crises, or breaking point, the tension in the book sort of just unravels unfulfillingly.

There also was the fact that this book uses (a lot) one of my big pet-peeves in stories: character talking out loud to themselves.  I get that it helps break up the constant flow of thoughts…but it has a tendency to read very fake.  Maybe it is just me, but when I talk to myself I don’t do it in full structured sentences.  The dialogue in this story was a little off to begin with–though I can’t pinpoint why it felt like that, much to my annoyance–but when you add in the stilted conversations that the characters have with themselvesit just messed up the flow of the story.  I don’t know, maybe there are people who talk like that, but for me it just didn’t work.

This was a decent story, but overall it lacked a certain punch that would have kicked up the rating.  I liked the BDSM, but there was a bit of a difference between Dom/sub and Jase/Toshi.  With the way their relationship works, the two are quite varied, but the heat I felt with the Dom/sub didn’t really transfer over to Jase/Toshi.  And while the villain was a nice twist, it also felt like the author didn’t know what to do with him so just kicked him out the story, leaving us hanging.  Plus…the leather fetish felt odd.  Which is doubly odd because I love leather.  Maybe they just spent too much time telling us how much they loved it, and not enough time showing it.  Either way, this story was interesting, but didn’t exactly hold my full attention.

RATING:

BUY LINKS: Dreamspinner Press  ::  Amazon  ::  ARe