Tag: Breathless Press

Guest Review: Ad-Dick-tion Volume 3: 10 Tales of Hot Male Obsessions by Various Authors

Posted August 18, 2013 by Tracy in Reviews | 0 Comments

18164515Tracy’s review of Ad-Dick-tion Volume 3 by Sax Alexander, Sally Max, Alex Carreras, Raven McAllan , Monica Corwin, Wt Prater, Dianne Hartsock, Carrie Pulkinen, Melody Kiss, Rhiannon Wellman

The Land of Embarrassment and Brunch by Sax Alexander

Jamie is head over heels for Chris, but does dating exclusively for six months mean it’s mutual? When an old college flame invites Jamie to his live art show, and Chris insists they attend, Jamie gets the answer to his question—a sizzling performance that just might steal the show.

The Thing About Being a Werewolf by Sally Max

Dumped, homeless, and hunted, wasn’t how Torolf thought he would be spending the full moon. His only hope is to find another pack and ask for asylum. While running for his life, a great white wolf appears, which can only mean one of two things: safety or death.

Sun, Surf, Sand, and a Sling by Alex Carreras

When David Hendricks suggests a getaway to Fort Lauderdale, Daniel Fletcher, David’s partner, jumps at the chance imagining blue skies, ocean breezes and sandy beaches. What he doesn’t imagine is a clothing optional resort were guests wear nothing but a smile, and each room has a sling suspended from the ceiling.

A New Dawn by Raven McAllan

Sam never thought he’d move forward with the help of his past in the shape of Alex. Would their history help or hinder them?

Underground Temptation by Monica Corwin

Rone spends his days guarding London’s elite and his nights seducing them. No one has ever been good enough, beautiful enough, to tame him. The Abyss, London’s premier night spot for an edgier crowd, always brings something new to the table. Tonight, his name is Josh.

Exercising His Options by Wt Prater

When Enver Mann started jogging every morning, it was at his wife’s provocation. After a year, he’s still at it, but now it’s his choice. Little does he know, that choice may open up a whole world to him. While jogging one day, he happens upon two men having sex, and for the first time he wants that. The man with the red hair and the incredible ass. And while his mind might second guess him, his wife doesn’t. When she instigates their encounter, Enver knows he will never look at life, or sex, the same way again.

Paul’s Mistake by Dianne Hartsock

Paul has no doubts. He wants Eran in his life. But can Eran, a young man from an abusive background, come to terms with his fears so he can have a future with this man he loves?

Fraternity Brothers by Carrie Pulkinen

When Aiden joins a fraternity, he has no idea a hazing incident with Miguel will change his life forever. Now, being friends with Miguel isn’t enough. Can Aiden plant the seed for romance to bloom without killing their friendship? Or will he have to settle for just being fraternity brothers?

Fun in the Guard House by Melody Kiss

A night out with friends unexpectedly changes Justin’s life. Just who is the sexy stranger from the club?

Animal Magnetism by Rhiannon Wellman

When Simon took his beloved dog for a walk he had no idea what it would lead to. With wild animals, sexy land owners, and a psychotic ex-boyfriend, he’s in for a wild ride. But boy will it be worth it.

Harvey has spent years locked away from everything, the fences around his land just as high as the ones around his heart. Simon is like a light in the dark. Will he be just what Harvey didn’t know he needed?

Both men need to learn to love again, but will their animals’ budding friendship be the catalyst for everything that follows

What can I say? This was a fun erotic m/m anthology. The stories, for the most part, were well put together and sexy as hell. There were a couple that I didn’t care for at all (and a couple with girly bits. Whaaaa?) but with so many stories it still gets a good rating. I think my favorites of the anthology were (but not the only ones I liked):

The Land of Enchantments and Brunch by Sax Alexander – I loved the characters, their personalities and they way they interacted with others. It was such a short story but packed a charming punch.

Exercising His Options by Wt Prater – This was one with girly bits but it worked for me despite that. I think it was the fact that this had a married couple striking out into the unknown. The wife was willing to take her husband’s attraction to a man and not think less of him.

Fraternity Brothers by Carrie Pulkinen – Fraternity brothers who fall in love – one gay, one who thinks he’s straight but probably isn’t. This story had very little to do with the fraternity but that’s what brought them together. Their friendship was what made this new love work for me.

One of the things I love about anthologies is the fact that I can read it all at once or come back for a short story in between novels. If your in the mood for a good m/m erotic anthology this would be a good one to pick up.

Rating: 3.75/4 out of 5

You can read more from Tracy at Tracy’s Place

This title is available from Breathless Press. You can buy it here or here in ebook. This book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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Guest Review: Not the Leader of the Pack by Annabeth Leong

Posted July 18, 2013 by Tracy in Reviews | 0 Comments

Guest Review: Not the Leader of the Pack by Annabeth LeongReviewer: Tracy
Not the Leader of the Pack by Annabeth Leong
Publisher: Breathless Press
Publication Date: May 31, 2013
Format: eARC
Genres: Paranormal Romance
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two-stars

When Juli Gunby left Missoula, Montana, she didn't intend to come back. Not to her exacting alpha werewolf father, and certainly not to Neil Statham, the beta who rejected Juli's girlish advances. Her father, as usual, has other ideas, using his dying breath to pass pack leadership to his daughter. Juli resolves to carry out her duty to her father and her pack, but the one man she wants on her side has made himself her enemy.

After years of loyal service to the pack, Neil expects to take over as alpha when his mentor dies. As good as it is to see Juli again, he knows he can’t trust her. After all, she abandoned both him and the pack years ago and never looked back. Neil determines to fight for his rightful position in the pack, even if that means going up against a woman who fills him with an overwhelming urge to mate every time she walks into the room.

Someone needs to lead, and the more Neil and Juli fight, the more they attract interference from those who would control the pack and destroy the ties between them.

Five years ago Juli Gunby put her heart on her sleeve and told Neil exactly how she felt about him. When she was rejected by him she ended up going to college in another state and then worked for the Werewolf Council – the incredibly strict governing board of the werewolves. She gets a call that her father, the alpha of her former pack in Missoula, Montana, is in the hospital and when she gets there she’s shocked at his declining health. He was too stubborn to call and tell Juli exactly how close to death he was. When she finally sees him in the ICU he wakes up enough to pass on his alpha ring to her and then dies.

Neil is the Beta of the Missoula pack and is beyond mad that Juli has “inherited” (as he puts it) the pack. He feels that since she’s been gone for five years and he’s been by her father’s side that he should have been the alpha. He tries to woo Juli into giving up the pack but she proves to be just as stubborn as her father. He tells himself that he doesn’t want to hurt her but in the end he challenges her to a fight for the alpha position.

The story has three components to it. The first being the problem of the alpha position between Neil and Juli. Yes, it was odd that Juli’s father had passed the position over to her but he obviously knew what he was doing. The fact that Neil couldn’t respect his former alpha’s decision didn’t sit well with me at all. The next component was the relationship between Juli and Neil. His rejection of her was because of the fact that it wasn’t legal for the pack beta to be involved with the alpha’s daughter. Here we come into the third component which is the Werewolf council. This governing board is all about the legal and keeping werewolves under their thumb.

Neil and Juli’s relationship…budding and otherwise played a huge role in the fight for the alpha position. Neil supposedly cared about Juli but he was such an ass to her about her being alpha! I just wanted to (using a term a friend used recently) junk punch him on a regular basis! For someone who supposedly respects this woman enough to be in love with her he certainly didn’t show it in any way shape or form. He was either acting like an ass, saying the wrong thing which either hurt Juli or downright pissed her off or wouldn’t say anything which had the same effect. In this story they were really fated mates who had to hold back but frankly I wanted Juli to run far, far away from Neil.

The Werewolf Council – geez…I’ve never read a shapeshifter novel that had a governing board that was so very strict! They had lycanthropy suppressants and they weren’t afraid to use them. Werewolves weren’t allowed to shift but 1 time a month and that was during the full moon. If they even shifted in the privacy of their own home, or partially shifted or got so emotional that just a tuft of hair on their arm showed they could get a citation and be a possible candidate for the suppressants. This was just one of the very, very many rules that were forced on the werewolves. The council representative in this book was such a starched uptight legaleez spew-er it was hard to think the woman had a heart.

Overall the story had a good premise but I just didn’t care for the execution very much. I couldn’t truly see Juli forgiving Neil for all the crap he’s put her through enough to actually fall in love with him. She was in love with him since she was 15 but when she was faced with the current Neil there just wasn’t much there. Alas this one just didn’t work very well for me and I found it to be just an ok read.

Rating: 2 out of 5

two-stars

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Guest Review: Temptation by Lee Brazil

Posted June 27, 2013 by Tracy in Reviews | 0 Comments

Guest Review: Temptation by Lee BrazilReviewer: Tracy
Temptation by Lee Brazil
Publisher: Breathless Press
Publication Date: June 7th 2013
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 76
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three-half-stars

After a hot interlude at a holiday party, Lake Wynters and Solomon Arsdale exchange phone numbers but not promises. Lake is fine with that until something happens he's never experienced. As days pass without Solomon calling, Lake discovers he just can't forget the sexy older man. Giving in to temptation, he takes matters into his own hands and visits Solomon at his office, breaking his own dating rules.

Waiting in Solomon's office, Lake is shaken to the core by how much Solomon's acknowledgement of their encounter means to him, and how much more he wants it to lead to.

But when the door he's eagerly watching opens, it brings new temptation in the form of Adonis Kosmias. Adonis isn't anything like Solomon. Not many would call him beautiful. His features are too harsh, his body too angular. But he moves with fluid grace and his hair falls in perfect waves and his eyes sparkle with warmth. From the first touch of his hand Lake is thrown into even greater confusion. So distracted by Adonis's touch is he, that when Solomon finally makes an appearance, their hands are still clasped.

Meeting Solomon again while holding hands with another man wasn't in Lake's plan. Neither was anything that happened afterward.

Lake is at a pre-Christmas party when he sees a man he wants to know better. He makes his intentions known from a distance and as the other man is paying rapt attention Lake knows that he has his man snared. After a bit Lake heads out to the hotel lobby and into a deserted hallway where the man, Solomon, eventually finds him. A short tryst occurs and they exchange numbers.

Cut to 3 weeks later and we see Lake pacing outside of Solomon’s office. You see Lake was interested in more than just a short tryst with Solomon and when Sol didn’t call – and according to Lake the men always call – he just couldn’t let it lie. When Lake finally makes it into Solomon’s office Sol introduces Lake to his partner, both in business and his private life, Adonis. Solomon and Adonis explain to Lake that they have an open relationship when it comes to trysts but never a second “date.” With Solomon he wanted to call Lake but Adonis put his foot down. Now that Adonis has met Lake he wants to get to know him better and the three start seeing each other. Unfortunately Lake has insecurities about being a third wheel in Sol and Adonis’s relationship and this makes Lake leave.

This was a quick short read that I enjoyed. I liked Sol and Adonis although we didn’t get to know them all that well. We heard about their past experience with a man but other than that not a whole lot. I liked what I saw though.

Lake is a young man (I’m not sure we ever learned his age) who is a model who lives more than comfortably and only takes jobs when he needs the money. He is smart about putting some money away for his future but he still spends more than he makes. He is immature and pretty self-centered but he gets a good kick in the head at some point during the book emotionally speaking and does do some growing. I was pretty happy that he got his shit together, I must say, as his constant running away from his problems was making me a bit crazy. He knew after he ran that he was wrong to do so but that didn’t make him pick up a phone and apologize which was wrong but he got it together eventually. In the end a good read.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

You can read more from Tracy at Tracy’s Place

This book is available from Breathless Press. You can buy it here or here in e-format. This book was provided by the publisher for an honest review.

three-half-stars

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Guest Review: Ride Free by Debra Kayn

Posted April 1, 2012 by Book Binge Guest Blogger in Reviews | 0 Comments

Judith’s review of Ride Free (The Chromes and Wheels Gang #2) by Debra Kayn

The sexy biker, Reefer, gave Sarah an hour’s worth of sex in a kiss that lasted no more than ten seconds. He knocked her world off kilter; but little did he know, he’d set directly on target for his heart.

Sarah always dreamed of joining a motorcycle gang and hitting the open road. What better way to escape a troubled childhood filled with poverty and alcoholism than to ride out and live a gypsy lifestyle? Her life changed the morning a biker stopped in the middle of the road and asked if she wanted a ride.

Reefer had two rules: don’t mess around with women who didn’t grow up riding the road, and his biker family always came first. Nothing prepared him for the woman who hopped onto the back of his Harley with the ease of a born rider and peeled back the layers of his sealed heart.  Two people running from a world full of hurt. Can they escape to find happiness or will they have to first revisit the past?


The Chromes & Wheel Gang, the biker “family” featured in the novels in this series, is an unusual group of people who are committed to life on the road, but in every sense of the word, they are family.  The leaders of the group, Knuckles and Sunflower Butter, are surrogate parents to Reefer, a man whose mother mysteriously left him with his father and whose dad, one of the biker family, died when he was 16 years old.  With abandonment issues, Reefer has made a promise to himself that he will never allow any female who is not a life-long biker, to become his permanent mate.  Yet when he spies Sarah Lightfeather, a visiting nurse, peeking at him and his group as they rode past the home  of one of his patients.  Little does he know that her dream has always been to ride free from her life even though she loves her patients and loves what she does.  What she doesn’t love is the fact that she will always carry the scars of having been raised by two alcoholics–a mother who has died of liver disease, and a dad who is even now drinking himself to death.  
This is a novel about two people who are kind and caring, genuine in all the right ways, but who are carefully guarding that part of themselves where the old wounds reside.  Yet Reefer cannot get Sarah’s sweet and beautiful face and smile out of his memories, and as he slowly gets to know her, realizes that she is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside.  As far as Sarah is concerned, Reefer is everything she has ever dreamed of in a man.  So it appears it is a coupling made in heaven.  Right?  Wrong!!  Sure, they manage to “get it on” and spend weeks together, each falling more and more in love with the other.  But when two people have not resolved their trust and abandonment issues, it doesn’t take much to upend the relationship.  That’s exactly how it played out between these two.
Ms Kayn has given us two novels that speak plainly about the issues that are probably uppermost in the experience of a large percentage of the human family, and the issues of trust and abandonment by the people who should love us the best are probably closest to our hearts and can hurt us deeply.  The saving grace about both these individuals is their willingness to admit their wrongs, to own up to making serious mistakes.  But one wonders if it is possible to move on when the person to whom we give our whole heart suddenly appears to be throwing that love and the loved one away like trash.  I have pondered that a lot since finishing this book, and I still wonder how someone gets past that.  A person may say “I forgive” but I wonder how much residual worry is left below the surface that can crop up at a later time and erode the good in the relationship.  I think this book deals with some of that.  The book is so well written, the characters are drawn with a sure hand, and the plot and story line clear and move forward.  I especially like the fact that there are no long, drawn out sections of internal monologue or that inner debate that some authors seem intent on putting in their stories.  (Yawn)  It is a good balance between dialogue and those quiet narrative portions of the novel.  I also found that the background characters were a hoot with names like Crank, Knuckles, Margarine, etc.
This author has a fine portfolio of published work and this is a good example of a novel written by someone who knows how to put a good novel together.  And for readers who like bikers and that sense of the open road, you will enjoy this story.  The first novel is equally entertaining and I am glad to have encountered this series, even though it was sort of an accident.

I give it a rating of 4 out of 5

The series:
Book Cover Book Cover

You can read  more from Judith at Dr J’s Book Place.
This book is available from Breathless Press You can buy it here or here in e-format.

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Guest Review: His Five Favorite Lines by Gina Gordon

Posted July 23, 2011 by Book Binge Guest Blogger in Reviews | 2 Comments

Judith’s review of His Five Favorite Lines by Gina Gordon

Jordan hasn’t been able to stop thinking about Becca since their steamy encounter in the elevator. He is determined to have her again but when she shoots down his proposition, Jordan decides to get creative. But over the course of the week, Jordan realizes it isn’t only sex that holds his interest and with every pick-up line the stakes get higher. This time, Jordan is playing for keeps.

This is truly a short story–a quickie read–and one that is really a lot of fun.  We have all heard about pick-up lines, and many have experienced them as well.  Our tale begins with the main characters having already had their erotic, sexy encounter in an elevator that got stuck.  (This encounter is the subject of the first story in this series: Her Five Favorite Words.   Becca is one of those people who gets claustrophobic and the hugs and kisses that morphed into another kind of togetherness were initially an attempt to prevent an all-out panic attack.  Jordan is definitely wanting more.  So he decides to use the five pick-up lines that have worked for him.

Becca is the kind of woman who backs up from emotional and sexual experiences and analyses–often to the ultimate death of a relationship.  Yet, Jordan is a persistent guy, and each day he finds a way to intercept her on the way to work–in the coffee shop, at the entrance to the elevators, waiting at the elevator on her floor, etc.  Does it work?  Well, that is the core of the story.

This little literary snack is one of those that can be enjoyed with your lunch, or a few minutes in the evening waiting for the microwave entre to cook, or some other short span of time in a day’s routine.  It is about two people who came together under unusual circumstances and are finding it hard to normalize their relationship, understanding rightly that one sexual encounter does not provide adequate foundation for anything other than, perhaps, an opportunity to get to know each other better in other ways.  I am not really a fan of short stories unless they are extremely well-written.  I found that this little piece was really quite adequate to tell the story and to not rush the characters through to a conclusion.  This is the second in a series of little stories having the number “five” in their title and it will be fascinating to see how this series plays out and how these two move on in their relationship.

I found this little story to be vastly entertaining.  It is cute and interesting and I recommend it.  I give this rating a 3.75 out of 5, mostly because of its shorter length than any other factor.

This book is available from Breathless Press. You can buy it here in e-format.

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