Review: Kept me on the edge of my seat!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 28, 2013
Wow! I just finished Jade Cary's Bella Rosa- a suspense & spanking (S&S; - it's a new genre!  ) and it was a wild ride!  I was sucked right in from the beginning and swept into the intrigue of Rowan, a smart and sexy surgeon, her drug cartel running ex-husband, an FBI agent out for personal vengeance, and Vince, the lieutenant who tries to keep our heroine safe.The sexual tension between Rowan and Vince drives the pacing as much as the suspense thread, which is very well done. Vince is all alpha- bordering on macho, and the first spanking is non-consensual- Jade's favorite thing.  I think non-consensual is hot, but I do get itchy with non-con in modern day settings. In this case, Rowan had just disobeyed Vince and taken a huge security risk, and the cop took her over his knee in anger. Jade is an incredible writer, so I had already fully identified with Rowan, and Jade made the situation about as real as it could be- Rowan's pride was stung by the spanking, and she was hurt and offended. She slinks into her room and starts packing her bag and I was cheering for her to leave.  Of course, if she'd left, there would be no more book, and Vince wouldn't have had a chance to redeem himself, which he does, although it took me longer to forgive him than it took Rowan.Jade doesn't write spanking fiction per se, it's more a suspense/romance that happens to have spanking in it.  You don't get that feeling of the nod and the wink between author and spanko that says, "I'm writing this to turn you on." Rather, she offers a top notch main-stream feeling plot with a dominant male who happens to believe in spanking his woman. For me, it made the spankings more squirm-worthy, more embarrassing, as I empathized with the heroine and witnessed the characters having real-life discussions about whether they were acceptable.  Still, it was clear that Rowan was turned on by Vince's dominance and the D/s sex they had together was smoking hot.  There's a scene with a blow job and a crop that still has me drooling...Ultimately, though, it was the development of the full-on suspense plot that had me hanging on the edge of my seat, unable to put the book down until it was over, and not even caring whether I got off.  Five stars for Bella Rosa!ARC provided to Spanking Romance Reviews for an honest review. Review (c) [...]