Blog Tour Review: Crash Into You – Roni Loren

Crash Into You by Roni Loren
Series:  Loving on the Edge #1
Release Date:  January 3, 2012
Publisher:   Berkley Trade
Page Count:  352
Source:  Goddess Fish Promotions
Buy the book at: Amazon 

Brynn LeBreck has dedicated herself to helping women in crisis, but she never imagined how personal her work would get, or where it would take her. Her younger sister is missing, suspected to be hiding from cops and criminals alike at a highly secretive BDSM retreat-a place where the elite escape to play out their most extreme sexual fantasies. To find her, Brynn must go undercover as a sexual submissive. Unfortunately, The Ranch is invitation only. And the one master who can get her in is from the darkest corner of Brynn’s past.
Brynn knows what attorney Reid Jamison is like once stripped of his conservative suit and tie. Years ago she left herself vulnerable only to have him crush her heart. Now she needs him again. Back on top. And he’s all too willing to engage. But as their primal desires and old wounds are exposed, the sexual games escalate-and so does the danger. Their hearts aren’t the only things at risk. Someone else is watching, playing by his own rules. And his game could be murder.  

For me, BDSM books are like a Cracker Jacks prize…you never know what you’re going to get.  Crash Into You feel into the, “Yay!  I love this prize,” category.  The BDSM is light, compared to some of the other books I’ve read, but this book is about so much more than the alternate lifestyle our hero and heroine engage in.   It’s the emotional journey they took to finally embrace what they enjoy and letting go of the past in order to move forward.

Told from both the present day and past, we get the history of Brynn LeBreck and Reid Jamison from their summer fling, to broken hearts and spirits, to solving the mystery around Brynn’s mother’s murder and her sister’s disappearance.

Brynn and Reid have a lot of history.  They met while she worked as a receptionist at his uncle campaign office one summer. They both fight their inner demons with their budding relationship (he fears his sexual desires mean he’s more like his rapist father than he wants to be and she’s from the wrong side of the tracks with a prostitute mother), but once they open up with each other they begin to explore their sexual desires in BDSM and be who they truly are.

But outside forces have a way of ripping people apart and that is what happens with Brynn and Reid.

Move forward ten years and fate pushes Brynn and Reid back together when he starts working at the women’s advocacy group where Brynn is a therapist.  All their old wounds open up, perhaps the biggest the fact that Reid represents the man who was convicted of killing her mother.  But those get pushed to the side when Brynn’s sister Kelsey disappears after a pleading midnight phone call for Brynn to meet her.

Brynn and Reid soon find themselves at a BDSM retreat posing as a Dom and his sub in hopes of finding Kelsey.  What they get instead is the realization that what abruptly ended ten years ago still burns between the two of them.   The problem is, the two of them have so much emotional baggage over their perceived sexual hang ups along with their mistrust of each other, you wonder how they are ever going to get passed it all.

It’s Brynn and Reid’s story that kept me engaged.  I didn’t so much care who really killed Brynn’s mother or what they had to do with her sister, I just wanted the two of them to realize what they had.  There was the old little twist of who Brynn’s biological father was and how that lead to the mother’s murder, sister’s kidnapping, Brynn’s abuse….but it was still Brynn and Reid that I wanted to read about on each and every page.