From Lukov with Love
From Lukov with Love by Mariana Zapata is $2.99 at Amazon! This romance was recommended in our recent Winter Olympics Rec League and Zapata is an auto-buy for many of you. This is a slow burn romance (like many of Zapata’s romances), but some found it too slow. Have you read this yet?
If someone were to ask Jasmine Santos to describe the last few years of her life with a single word, it would definitely be a four-letter one.
After seventeen years—and countless broken bones and broken promises—she knows her window to compete in figure skating is coming to a close.
But when the offer of a lifetime comes in from an arrogant idiot she’s spent the last decade dreaming about pushing in the way of a moving bus, Jasmine might have to reconsider everything.
Including Ivan Lukov.
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If Ever I Should Love You by Cathy Maxwell is $1.99! This is the first book in the Spinster Heiress series and features a marriage of convenience. Content warning, as there is rape as part of a character’s backstory, which some readers found unnecessary. However, many readers loved the heroine.
Once upon a time there were three young ladies who, despite their fortunes, had been on the Marriage Mart a bit too long. They were known as the “Spinster Heiresses” . . .
He’s inherited a title, but not a penny to speak of, so the Earl of Rochdale knows he must find a wife—preferably one tolerably pretty and good-tempered, but definitely wealthy, and willing to exchange her fortune for his family name.
His choice: Leonie Charnock, one of the season’s “Spinster Heiresses.” Years before, the earl had saved the dark-eyed beauty’s reputation, and she is still breathtakingly lovely, leading Rochdale to hope that their marriage will be more than in name only.
However, Leonie doesn’t want to be anyone’s wife. Nearly destroyed by the secrets in her past, Leonie agrees to their union with one condition: there will be a wedding but no bedding. But it’s a condition the new Countess Rochdale isn’t sure even she can keep . . .
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Dragon Actually by G.A. Aiken is $1.99! This is the first book in the Dragon Kin series, which many praise for having kickass heroines. It also looks like the book has a new cover. I apparently read this book according to my Goodreads, but I remember next to nothing about it.
It’s not always easy being a female warrior with a nickname like Annwyl the Bloody. Men tend to either cower in fear – a lot – or else salute. It’s true that Annwyl has a knack for decapitating legions of her ruthless brother’s soldiers without pausing for breath. But just once it would be nice to be able to really talk to a man, the way, she can talk to Fearghus the Destroyer.
Too bad that Fearghus is a dragon, of the large, scaly and deadly type. With him, Annwyl feels safe – a far cry from the feelings aroused by the hard-bodied, arrogant knight Fearghus has arranged to help train her for battle. With her days spent fighting a man who fills her with fierce, heady desire, and her nights spent in the company of a magical creature who could smite a village just by exhaling, Annwyl is sure life couldn’t get any stranger. She’s wrong…
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We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!Slave
Slave by Cheryl Brooks is $1.99! This is a scifi, paranormal, erotic romance. The hero is part of a feline race and has to pose as the heroine’s master so she can infiltrate a society to investigate the disappearance of her sister. Some people found the mix of genres didn’t quite work, while others thought it was a fun, sex-filled read.
He may be the last of a species whose sexual talents were the envy of the galaxy
“I found him in the slave market on Orpheseus Prime, and even on such a god-forsaken planet as that one, their treatment of him seemed extreme.”
Cat is an enslaved warrior from a race with a feline gene that gives him awesome beauty, fearsome strength, and sensuality and sexual prowess unmatched by any other males in the universe. Even filthy, chained, and beaten, he gives off an aura of power and virility and his feline gene gives him a special aura.
Jacinth is an intergalactic trader on a rescue mission and she needs a man she can trust with her life.
She has spent years pursuing her kidnapped sister from planet to planet. Now her quest leads her to a place where all the women are slaves. “Jack” needs a slave of her own-one who can masquerade as her master.
Enmeshed in a tangle of deception, lust, and love, they must elude a race of violent killers and together forge a bond stronger than any chains.
The first book in wildly popular Cat Star Chronicles, a paranormal romance series featuring heroes with a feline gene that gives them remarkable sexual powers.
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Also on sale:
KJ Charles’ An Unsuitable Heir (Book 3 in the Sins of the Cities series) for $1.99 – genderqueer trapeze artist (who is secretly an earl) and a detective team up to solve a killer’s identity.
Taylor Brooke’s Fortitude Smashed is $0.99 (Book 1 in the Camelia Clocks series) – M/M about a detective and an art thief finding out that they’re soulmates.
If you like the soulmate mark trope, you want to check this one out. (BTW, the second book in the series is F/F and dropping soonish.)
The Cat Star books are, quite frankly, silly as all get out and the humor a bit forced. That said, I read them all. LOL. I also had fun reading Rena Marks’s Space Babies, so that tells you something about my taste in books when I need some escape. But they’re not too different from the Aiken/Laurenston books (less substantial, tho) if those appeal.
Completely by Ruthie Knox is .99 on Amazon.
I really liked From Lukov With Love, but there’s one moment (just one) where she uses the wrong name for a spin that drove me crazy. It’s a Biellmann spin, not a camelback! Yes, I get obsessive about figure skating during the Olympics…
I think I binged through the Cat Star books several years ago. They were really fun to read but I’ve never felt an urge to reread them.
Heartstone by Elle Katharine White is $1.99. It’s Pride and Prejudice with Dragons! Redheadedgirl gave it a B+.
http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/heartstone-by-elle-katharine-white/
My roommate loves the cat books. I am tempted to try this again, maybe I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
I really enjoy Mariana Zapata, The Wall of Winnipeg is one of my all time favorite books (I read it cover to cover 5 times last year).. BUT.. this book, From Lukov with Love.. I’m about 10 pages from DNFing it! Solely for this reason: at 8% in the book we have moved forwards maybe… 45 mins in the story? She goes from the ice rink to the manager’s office. That is it.. in 8%! Everything is her talking in her head and filling us in on her backstory and frankly, at this point in the story, I don’t care! Also she supposedly hates the hero but we have no idea why. But we do know 8,000 other random facts about her childhood years, family, and education. Should I keep going? Does it get better?
It took me about 25% of Lukov to get into it, but once I did, I enjoyed it. I really love Mariana Zapata books, and while this one was not my absolute favorite, it was pretty good.
I really enjoyed From Lukov with Love, partly because Zapata is increasingly a go-to for sports romance for me. I think it works better if you read Dear Aaron already, as it happens 7 years (approximately) after the close of that book and follows the youngest Santos sibling (who was a source of frustration for Ruby in Dear Aaron).
I found the overall Santos family dynamic engaging, I addition to Jasmine committing to fixing her self-perceived character flaws without the eventual romantic partner being the impetus for the changes.
The cover copy for Slave makes me cringe, every time they use the singular gene for several unrelated cat like traits. I hope that is a mistake in the cover copy and not the searies. I would hope that even fluffy scifi author’s would bother with the minimal research in looking up the scientific definition of a gene.
@Alyssa: Not so much sci-fi as ‘paranormal’ ‘erotic’ ,’fun’ and ‘sex-filled’. I don’t think scientific accuracy was the point.
The kindle sample for Heartstone has no content beyond the index. How useless!
I LOVE Mariana Zapata, and I wish there was someone who wrote romances that dealt with non-sports careers the way that she deals with sports careers. As in, I’d love to read a romance where the heroine has a demanding white-collar job and the resolution isn’t that she needs to care less about her job (or leave her job) in order to find love.
My only complaint: in From Lukov with Love, there is a scene where the heroine tells the hero that she’s on birth control and isn’t ovulating for a week. +100 for a discussion about safe sex, BUT. While there’s no specificity about what “on birth control” means, colloquially, that’s usually a reference to birth control pills. If you are taking birth control pills, you’re not ovulating – that’s how they work.*
*Yes, there is a failure rate, but the heroine should not be regularly ovulating on BC pills.
I really enjoy Mariana Zapata’s books. No matter what sport the characters play, I always learn something new about it. I definitely think that From Lukov with Love benefitted from being released around the Olympics because I was more invested in it from the start than I would have been otherwise. As previous commenters have stated, this book starts out SLOOOOOW. I love how hard Jasmine works at everything, because for me that makes it better when things go right. The family scenes were uncomfortable in the most realistic way. This wasn’t my favorite Zapata book (Kulti, maybe?), but I liked it well enough to recommend to others.