Review: Yours to Take – Joely Sue Burkhart

Yours to Take by Joely Sue Burkhart
Series:  The Connaghers #3
Release Date:  May 8, 2012
Publisher:  Samhain Publishing
Source:  Novel Sidekick
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All fire and gunpowder need is a stray spark…

The Connaghers, Book 3

The day one of her old clients gunned down a cop, former defense attorney Vicki Connagher lost everything—her passion for justice, and her lover, Detective Elias Reyes. The dead cop’s partner.

Even though she’s following her dream to start her own fashion line, it’s tough with heartache as her only companion. Until she brings Jesse, a wandering street artist, in from a freak Texas snowstorm. His submissive flirting brings out dominant tendencies she never knew she possessed, yet she hesitates to let him take her as far and as hard as she wants to go.

Some homeless junkie in Vicki’s house? Not on Elias’s watch. Pride kept him away, but as long as Jesse is staying in Vicki’s downstairs shop, he’s staying with Vicki. On the couch, but it’s a start.

As the days go by, the three work out an uneasy alliance. But Vicki’s joy at having Elias back in her life is tempered with a growing desire to have it all. Elias in her bed, and Jesse under her command. The only question remaining is if her tough alpha cop is willing to embrace all that she is… 

Reviewer’s Thoughts:
I will admit I haven’t read Connaghers 1 or 2, so I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into with Yours to Take, but I really enjoyed it.

Vicki Connagher was a defense attorney who left it all behind after one of her clients killed her cop boyfriend’s partner.  But leaving her job behind wasn’t all that she lost that day.  Her boyfriend, Elias, stopped seeing her, leaving her to believe he blamed her for what happened.

Now designing her own fashion line, Vicki run into another blast from her legal days in the form of the street artist she used to visit, Jesse.  He finds her on a snowy night and she suddenly can’t let him leave.  She wants to protect him, nurture him and strangely, dominate him.  And just as Jesse enters her life, Elias comes back to claim his woman.

If you ever want a study in how an very alpha male and dominate female, in a tenuous relationship, work a submissive male into their relationship, this book gives it to you.  Elias is a true Alpha male.  What’s his is his and nobody else’s….especially his woman.  Elias and Vicki have an interesting relationship, because they both fought for dominance in the relationship.  Elias may have thought Vicki’s likes in bed were a spill over from the tough exterior she had to display at the law firm, but with her much more relaxed atmosphere as a designer, she still had that need to be “top dog”.

On the flip side of that was Vicki and Jesse.  Jesse knew he was in love with Vicki, part of the reason he sought her out.  But when she saw him, it was as if her dominance switch got flipped on and all those Dom needs to take care of their sub came out.  And while Jesse knew what he wanted, he never pushed Vicki into her role.  He knew she had to come to grips with what she was with him before they could move forward.  I applaud Vicki for insisting that she and Jesse both get counseling.  It seemed to truly help her open up to what she was feeling.

Meshing the two sides of Vicki and her men into a happy unit was not easy and I’m guessing it never is when you have one person who is unsure of what their role is in the grand scheme of things.  But what it came down to for Elias in the story was how much he needed Vicki and how willing he was to give her what she needed both from him and from Jesse.