Review – Nauti Temptress by Lora Leigh

I will start by saying that the blurbs on the author’s site, publisher’s site, Amazon, and Goodreads are wrong. The setting and hero’s name is right, everything else including the heroine’s name, background, and plot are incorrect.

Here’s the real story.

Dawg Mackay has four teenage half-sisters he never knew about. Timothy Cranston shows up to break the news, with the sisters and their mother in tow. Family is everything to the Mackays and Dawg steps up to take care of them. This is in the prologue. The story takes place five years later.

Eve Mackay is the oldest sister. She’s had the hots for Brogan Campbell, one of the men who lives at the family’s bed and breakfast, ever since he came to town two and a half years ago. The attraction is mutual. Brogan was sent to work undercover in Somerset with the main objective to get close to Eve for reasons unknown. He waited because he didn’t want to drag her into the middle of an operation but now he’s tired of waiting. Dawg has heard the rumors that Brogan is a traitor and forces Eve to promise she’ll stay away from him. This is a promise Eve can’t keep.

I would like to tell you more about the plot but I can’t. Not because it’s spoilers. I just didn’t understand it. It’s the most convoluted book I’ve ever read. I couldn’t follow it with a map and a flashlight. After reading the entire book, I still don’t know why Eve was involved.  Or who the mystery man is that was mentioned constantly during the first half of the book. Or what Dawg knew and when he knew it. It was all, well, dumb. At one point Brogan thinks:

What the fuck was going on in this place, and just how screwed up were the criminals operating here?

I don’t know, Brogan. I’m wondering the same thing.

More than having a wacky plot that confused me, this book made me angry. The blatant disrespect for women by the men in this book was rage inducing. In the prologue, Natches calls his terrified teenage cousins that he just met bitches.  Later, Eve is explaining to Brogan that she’s not sleeping with him until he sees her as his equal. He tells her when “you’ve grown a ten inch dick at some point” he’ll consider her his equal. It looks like in the new Mackay world you are only worthy of respect if you have a penis.

Brogan was once engaged. The condom broke, the fiancee became pregnant then aborted his child without talking to him. He dumped her. Fast forward to the first time Brogan and Eve have sex. The condom breaks and he doesn’t tell her. The next afternoon, he has sex with her again, this time without the condom. When she mentions it, he says it doesn’t matter. Whatever happens was started the night before when the condom broke. When she asks why he didn’t tell her, he said he wanted to wait until it was too late for her to take the morning after pill because he doesn’t believe in abortion. She is hurt and feels betrayed.

She couldn’t believe he would even suspect she would do something so horrible. That she would abort her baby, just get rid of it as though it were trash.

Where do I even start with that? Maybe with the fact that the morning after pill isn’t abortion? It only prevents conception, the same as regular birth control does. Or maybe what a jerk Brogan is for not giving Eve the courtesy of knowing the condom broke. He didn’t even assure her he was disease free. And he never once offers an apology at any point in the book. I expected many things from this book but a morality lesson from the author wasn’t one of them.

A few of the interactions between Natches and Rowdy were amusing. Other than that, I found nothing redeemable about this book.

1 star

Genre: Romantic Suspense
Release Date: November 6, 2012
Format: Print and Digital

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*ARC provided by publisher