Linda @ (un)Conventional Bookworms

Dane - Liliana Hart
Series: The MacKenzie Family #1
Published by: Bodysways Publishing, on 11 July 2014
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Erotica
Pages: 56,Source: Kindle Freebie

Bad boy, Dane MacKenzie, is coming home to Surrender, Montana. It's been ten years since he left the woman he loved behind to make a name for himself, and now he's bound and determined to claim her once and for all.But Charlotte Munroe has no desire to welcome home the Prodigal Son with a fatted calf. The bitterness of Dane's betrayal runs deep, and she has no plans of letting him back into her life. Especially since she's trying to protect the son Dane isn't aware exists from heartbreak, since she's sure he's only going to walk out of their lives again.

Dane is extremely hot, but also extremely short, so the story felt a little hurried.

 My Dane review:

Dane has so much hotness it’s impossible not to feel the heat while reading, and the erotic scenes were very well executed. However, the fact that the story was so short made it less good than it could have been – especially because it involves one of my all-time favorite romance tropes: second chances! Sadly, it also includes one of my top pet peeves, the one where a couple has sex without using a condom. Even if they had been involved before, that was ten years ago, and they had no way to know if the other person had a sexually transmitted disease or not.

Dane and Charlotte were high school sweethearts, but after the death of Dane’s mother, he left Surrender and Charlotte behind to get a career as a journalist. Ten years later, he finally feels the need to go back home, and the first person he runs into is Charlotte, or rather, she almost hits him in the head with a wrench – before falling all over him. They have hot sex in her office before she leaves him, letting him think it meant nothing to her.

Charlotte has a secret, however, and she wants to keep her son Jayden from Dane because she doesn’t want him to disrupt their lives. This is something I could completely understand, he had left years before without knowing about her pregnancy, and now he was back in town, but she had no idea how long he’d stay for. This is where I think the story could have done better with a much slower pace, as everything happened within a few hours, and this made my suspension of disbelief difficult to hold on to. A woman so adamant to hold on to her feelings, and to keep her son safe from heartache would not have given in to Dane the way Charlotte did.

There were some inconsistencies as well, the most blatant when it came to Dane’s brother Cooper. On one page he was described as having hair as black as midnight and cobalt blue eyes, on the very next page in comparison with another brother, Thomas who shared similar looks with Cooper, apart from the fact that his eyes were dark brown instead of grey. And there were some typos as well – note that my copy was released in 2011, maybe those have been corrected if there has been a re-release.

All in all, I did enjoy this story, though, and I’m curious about the three other MacKenzie brothers, so I’ll be checking them out in the future.

Some of my favorite Dane quotes:

Dane had the body of a brawler and ready fists, but there were some folks – usually women – who claimed the smile that graced his sensuous lips when those fists connected with another man’s flesh was enough to make any woman want to take a walk on the dark side.

But now he was here. Home. And Charlotte wasn’t. He’d lost his chance there. It was his one regret for leaving. The pang of memory hadn’t lessened over the year.

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• Winter COYER 2014 2015