#TBRChallenge Reading Update: 50%

 

Let her have such power—the power to render a man as self-possessed as Rob completely helpless

I love how you can tell there is thoughtfulness planned out in this story. There's the sexiness but there is thought behind it, Rob's desire and need to be tied up, especially loving the rope, and wanting to feel in servitude to his bedroom partner compliments Merry's desire to feel and express/perform her new sense of power.

She did, and he slid a forearm beneath each of her thighs, tilting her hips up. She held her breath. Broad palms warmed her ribs, and she felt cradled, like a goblet tipped to a man’s mouth. He was going to taste her—sample her. Consume her. Make a banquet of her.

I mean, HELLO.

She scared him for knowing, but she scared him more for the way she’d smiled when she’d asked it. That she could read Rob’s thoughts, the ones that came second only to the urge for a drink in their ability to unnerve him, the ones that had haunted him his entire life, and . . . and smile. That she could find some measure of delight and curiosity in it, when all it had ever brought Rob was shame and rejection.

Oh, Rob :(  Don't mess this up with your fear. I love this moment, the sexiness, the fear, our characters revealing themselves, the connection, gah! All of it.

Deep down, he could hear his own voice whispering, Don’t go. Deep down, he wondered which hurt more—shame or loneliness.

Gawd, the swirling emotion. Also, I'm only halfway in and for McKenna to have this much of me invested and this heavy of emotion is amazing.

Scary as this was . . . telling her these things was like a bloodletting. The initial cut hurt like hell, but with it done he could feel the toxins escaping, making room for relief.

Ok, this scene of Mary not letting Rob shied or hide away from what she sensed in the bedroom made my eyes water. The way Rob not only finally gets what he wants but realizes that he doesn't have to be ashamed of it. It's obviously not a full turn around because the shame he holds is a lifetime accruement but the beginning in there and I love when the romance genre gives readers this.

He’d unnerved his mother with the games he played, got caught too many times with some manky old rope in his mouth or wound too-tight around his fingers. She’d sent him to therapy. Your father’s not to know. No one’s to know.

Ahh, so this is where his relationship with his mother broke down. 

The oddest Russian nesting doll ever, Rob was. A gruff and self-sufficient shell snapped closed to hide a happily spineless wretch. Though inside that wretch, the gleefully belittled one of his fantasy life, slave to his fetish . . . there was another man still. The drunk. The outcast. A man too weak and damaged and loathsome to even inhabit those degrading fantasies. But he’d cracked open quite enough of himself for Merry to pick through for one afternoon.

I constantly harp on wanting layers and depth to characters and not only is McKenna giving it, she comes right out and says it, lol. 

Where were you when I was twenty? How different might his life have been, if he’d known someone like Merry before he’d met his wife? But at twenty he’d never have shared what he wanted, not even with an eager ear such as Merry’s listening. She’d have been wasted on him back then.

Oh my gosh, how true is this?! I'm in my late thirties and I'm not sure I would have appreciated the layers in this story and characters in my early twenties.

This was quite the section, reveals between Merry and Rob, his sexual kink in the bedroom and some reveals to the reader, how serious his alcoholism was (cirrhosis & DUIs).