Valerie Twombly, $4.99, ISBN 978-1-5323-8105-8
Fantasy Romance, 2016
Jenna Dunne knows that she is destined to be dragon dude Connor O’Rourke’s mate from the moment she is just an egg in her mother’s womb calling, “O, where is the sperm that will make me a dragon’s destined mate?”
The one betrothed to him when he was little more than three hundred years old. She’d been a baby when their fathers had decided the two would be joined. He still recalled the pinprick her father had made on her little finger so he could draw blood for Connor to taste. She hadn’t made a peep. And when he’d done the same, placing his finger on her lips, she’d opened and suckled. Their bond had begun; it would be finished when she was old enough to mate.
There’s nothing creepy about that at all. This is not baby trafficking or pimping or anything like that. Bonding a baby to a 300-year old fellow—that’s what sweet dreams are made of!
Well, being perpetually pregnant with mutant dragon-human babies and having these babies explode out her womb should be every woman’s greatest dream and aspiration, but noble Jenna alas knows that she must deny her ardor for Connor’s own good. You see, she is only half-dragon, so she will never be able to pop out his dragon babies.
Given that dragon people are dying out—the number of dragon-dude romances that I keep coming across begs to differ—she knows that she must not let him mate with her. Since she can’t stop her legs from parting for such a virile dragon peen, however, she can still tell her legs to run, so she runs.
I don’t know what the big deal is. What, dragon dudes can’t get brats through surrogate moms or something?
Connor is a firefighter, so to ensure that he will never find her again, she runs away from Minnesota to work at a firehouse in Dallas.
You know, I should have known what is up in Valerie Twombly’s His Burning Desire on the first page itself, when I come across this gem:
Dragons hated heat but loved fire.
What? Are we talking about CGI of fire or something? Are these dragons David Copperfield now?
Anyway, Connor enters the horny-horn “MUST SHAG ME MATE NON-STOP NOW OR I GO HULK SMASH, AHHHH!” mode that every other author loves to use, along with the forced bond crap, to push the romance along.
Fortunately, some villain is thoughtfully setting buildings on fire in Dallas, so Connor books a flight for him and his throbbing erection to go there to use his big hose on everyone.
Gee, I wonder whether he’d bump into his mate there…
This one is a very by the numbers story where the romance is concerned. Nobody has any agency, not him, not her.
Mind you, the fact that she has no say from the moment she was born is doubly creepy, and it’s a tragic kind of dumb that her decision to leave him has nothing to do with her lack of agency but rather, some stupid self-sacrificing stunt that she only half-asses her way through.
I mean, if she really didn’t want to be found, that dumb heifer could have at least moved to Ulan Bator or something.
The romance is more like a toy assembled in a line. Here’s the forced mate bond, here’s the hero forced to put it in and shoot or else he’d die or something, and here’s the heroine having to put out because she has to. Is this love or a mathematical equation?
Also, the plot is just filler for the most part, an excuse to have the hero and the heroine thrown back together.
So yes, the romance is generic shifter bond-shag-heat 101, with bonus addition of creepy PDF file undertones to the whole 300-year old man wanting to stick it in to a baby but he’d graciously wait until she can walk first thing, but who knows, maybe there is a big market for romances catering to Reddit administrators everywhere.
This is a shame because the author’s writing style is actually pretty easy to digest. The pacing is tight, the conversations flow well, and the narrative is solidly readable without tired and tedious interruptions for exposition dumps.
Oh well, the things authors write for the moolah, I guess.
