I think I mentioned on Wendy’s blog what a difficult time I have resisting an Emma Holly book when I have one on my TBR stacks. This book was no exception. I had a big stack of other library books that were due before Velvet Glove and a couple of books I needed to review. What did I do? I didn’t READ it, per se—I just started sneaking peeks. Long, extended peeks. Hell, I ended up reading half the book by peeking. It’s like my friend Edouard claiming he doesn’t want a slice of coffee cake, he’s just happy picking some crumbs off the platter, and before I know it there’s a huge freakin’ hole gouged out of the side of my cake. (Oh, I miss that French bastard. Why the hell would anyone leave Portland for Marseilles? So what if he found a higher-paying job with a company that was much less infuriating than the one he worked for here? Portland has ME, dammit, and I’m awesome.)

Sorry. Get thee behind me, tangent! Anyway, I reserved Velvet Glove at the library purely based on the page count—I picked the skinniest Emma Holly book they had in a very, very sad attempt to salvage my hopeless TBR status. Later on I got curious and looked up the synopsis on Amazon.com. Sweet young thang in dire straits moves in with gay boss, gay boss’s boyfriend is a cross-dressing bisexual lounge singer, BDSM hijinks ensue. Holy Dr. Frankenfurter, Batman!

That’s the short version. The long version goes thusly: The heroine, Audrey, is introduced to the delights of BDSM when she meets a much, much older banker named Sterling while vacationing in Florida. She abandons everything—her job, her friends, her apartment in Washington D.C.—to literally become this man’s sex slave. However, after a few months, she realizes that what she has with Sterling isn’t exactly what you’d call a healthy relationship, so she makes like an Aerosmith song and runs away, runs away from the pain, yeah yeah yeah yeah.

(Sorry. If it’s any consolation, now I have it stuck in my head, too.)

Sterling, on the other hand, isn’t quite ready to let go and takes steps to keep Audrey under his control, even from a distance. He not only sends somebody to track her every move and take photos, he calls a senator who owes him a favor and asks him to keep Audrey safe (and untouched) until Sterling is ready to claim her. The senator in turn contacts his son, Patrick, who coincidentally is also into BDSM. The senator isn’t pleased with the implied blackmail, and tells Patrick he’ll be happy if things don’t turn out quite as Sterling planned.

Audrey, in the meanwhile, has run back into the arms of her best friend, Tommy. Frankly, I liked him better than Patrick, who’s yummy but a pretty standard romance novel hero—tall, dark, commanding, massive wang-a-doodle, etc. etc. Hot, but nothing too special. Tommy, on the other hand, is skinny, very sweet, great in the sack AND a computer geek. RRROWR. Audrey, of course, prefers the tall, dark, commanding, massive wang-a-doodle type, and more than that, she likes ‘em to spank her and chain her up. That doesn’t prevent her from having some scorching-hot fun of the “everything but putting Tab A in Slot B” variety with Tommy (who’s been in love with her since they were kids) while staying at his apartment.

Soon, however, she realizes that that somebody is tailing her. She ducks into a bar, Dugan’s, which is owned by—surprise, surprise—Patrick, who is quite startled to see the woman he’s supposed to keep tabs on. He hires her as a waitress, but he’s determined to keep her closer and ultimately wants her to move in with him. To help her feel more secure about accepting and also to throw off Sterling’s spies, he asks his cross-dressing lounge singer, Basil, to be his beard and temporary roommate. Uncomfortable with Tommy’s burgeoning feelings for her and feeling increasingly unsafe, Audrey agrees to move in with Patrick and Basil.

That’s when the REAL fun begins, starting with when she finds out that Basil isn’t gay, he’s bisexual, and the fun really kicks up when she finds out that Patrick isn’t a homo either, he just plays one on TV.

I gotta give Holly credit: she actually made BDSM sexy to me. While I find certain aspects of it appealing, I don’t find the whole pleasure-in-pain thing all that sexy. It didn’t help that my introduction to BDSM erotica was with A.N. Roquelaure’s Beauty series, which features lots of outright rape and sexual torture, some of it pretty brutal. Velvet Glove didn’t bruise any of my tender sensibilities, since it mostly concentrated on the bondage and domination aspects, not so much sadism and masochism. All of the sex scenes in this book are scorching hot, and some of the scenes with Tommy (and Tommy’s girlfriend)…. Oh my.

One of the best things about the book is Basil. He’s flamboyant but not flaming; with a character like that, the temptation must be there to turn him into Divine. Thank God Holly avoided that particular pitfall. I also liked how Basil coaxed Patrick along the road to man-on-man nookie, because unlike the two primary males in Strange Attractions, Patrick isn’t bi to begin with, and has to learn to accept sex with another man. In a real sense, we get to see Patrick lose his virginity.

Audrey is quite charming; like Charity of Strange Attractions, she’s a free spirit and a pocket hedonist. The two of them are virtually interchangeable, really, except that Audrey is a bit younger. I do find it refreshing that a woman gets to have lots and lots of hot, sweaty, slutty fun throughout the book and still come up the winner, because the preponderance of literature tends to hammer home the message that sluts (female sluts, anyway) are either mentally imbalanced, evil or deserving of death for having unsanctioned orgasms. I do hope the next Emma Holly heroine I encounter will be different, though, because I’ll tire of non-stop Charity/Audrey clones real quick.

Patrick is also quite appealing. Like I said, he’s quite standard romance novel hero material—poor baby was abandoned by mommy and has problems forming attachments, boo hoo hoo—but Holly takes care to show how different his Mastering technique is from Sterling’s. In other words: Patrick is alpha, but not an asshole. Yay! However, I do wish Holly would stop belaboring certain aspects of his appearance, like his twinkling eyes; yes, I get it, they twinkle. Twinkle twinkle, like little stars. Puh-leeease.

But the part that really made my eyes roll in the book is the short erotic story Patrick tells Audrey while engaging in one of their games. It has a certain 1001 Arabian nights flavor, which is all right, but swear to God, the phrase “fleshy sword” is used, not just once, but a few times. That term should be outlawed from romance novels of any sort. I hope this is not an indication of Holly’s historical voice, because I have her two Victorians winging their way to me from Amazon.com as I write this.

As a villain, Sterling is pretty standard romance novel stuff. He’s kind of nuts, although in an interesting twist that most romance novels don’t feature, he’s the one who gives Audrey all the initial lessons about pleasure, instead of the hero. And speaking of villains: There is a completely extraneous chapter featuring the photographer/gumshoe Sterling sics on Audrey that could’ve easily been cut from the book. It adds absolutely nothing to the story, and it actually gives the impression that this guy is going to play a much larger role than he does. Instead, we briefly see him acting all skeezy and creepy, then poof, no mention of him ever again for the rest of the book.

The romance itself is believable, and in some ways is more fully fleshed-out than the love story in Strange Attractions. Not having a suspense plot and quantum mechanics to mangle gave her a bit more room to develop the relationship, I think, and there are a few vignettes in which we see Audrey and Patrick just hanging out and enjoying each other’s company even though they’re not taking part in any sexual games. Brief though these scenes are, they do establish that these people genuinely like each other instead of being enamored merely with the hot monkey sex. And that is probably why I enjoy Emma Holly’s books so much: not only does she smash all sorts of taboos with great panache and glee, and not only is the sex explicit and well-written, but the protagonists are extremely likeable, the story is generally well-written and I close the book with that warm, fuzzy, satisfied feeling an HEA ending gives me.