Leone’ Sweet, $2.99, ISBN 978-0-578-51324-9
Contemporary Erotica, 2019
I bought Leone’ Sweet’s Lance because of the impressive typography on the cover. What, you all don’t believe me? I have never read anything from this author before, but I am always willing to keep an open mind especially when the story in question comes with such amazing use of fonts and colors on the cover. Ahem.
IT’S BEEN ONE MONTH to the day that Alexander and his wife Gladys were married, and I’m surprised he’s back from his honeymoon so soon. Meetings and confrontations. It seems that’s what I live for. There’s something about listening to other people talk, mainly about themselves, and conversing with others that really helps me size up a person.
Take Alexander Kincaid for instance—a rich, influential, control freak, and a man who’s loyal and devoted to his friends and family. He likes to be in control, and he wields that control in every aspect of his life.
After hiring my firm to provide security for his sister Eleanora, Gladys and Gabriella, their best friend and former roommate, Kincaid also utilizes my services as a security consultant for Kincaid Tech.
Then there’s Bartholomew Sinclair, a big-ass Viking with an attitude to match, who happens to be one of Kincaid’s best friends. “Bull” to those who call him friend is a secretive motherfucker if I ever saw one. But, there’s one very important secret I know of that would fuck up his relationship with Alexander, and though it’s not my business to say out loud, Kincaid needs to look closely at his inner circle.
Then we have Ramsey Winston, Bull’s cousin, and another best friend of Alexander’s. He’s an ex-military, grumpy, tattooed furniture designer. His secrets are a little more complicated, as is the man himself. I served with Ramsey in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East. He’s a fellow marine, and Ram and his friends keep me busy.
And then you have me, Lancelot Howard, owner of Howard Security Professionals, ex-military, marine for life, and dominant by nature and lifestyle. Everything I know about the armed security business I learned from my father. Everything I’ve learned about being a marine I learned from Uncle Sam.
Sis, we’ve just met. It’s a bit much to use the first five paragraphs of the story to sell me past and future stories right away like some desperate MLM marketer desperate to meet a quota.
The premise should be familiar to folks that have read enough of these hot rocket bodyguard stories.
Lancelot Howard, who’d like to be called Lance because it’s more sexy and marketable, has his eye on Gabriella, the lady mentioned above.
Gabriella Michaels has done well for herself, for someone that grew up on the streets before she was adopted by a pastor and his family, and that’s basically the sum of her entire personality—her biological parents suck, her past sucks, and hence she must never give in to the attentions of that hot, lusty, hung, and rich dude. Well, for a few chapters at least—romance heroines can’t put out that quickly or people may think they actually want and like sex, and that will be horrible indeed.
There is some suspense later on in the story, but it’s not really suspenseful, as Lance obviously has all the resources and abilities to be rid of this threat with a snap of his fingers and a thrust of his crotch. The bulk of the story is about him teaching her the ways of BDSM (guess who’s the dominant one, snort), her moaning about her past, him getting all protective over her. It’s the same old routine, in other words, just add BDSM, or rather, the romance novel version of BDSM—mostly just some bossing around from the man before getting down to business.
The best thing about Lance are the sex scenes. No, not because I find them particularly erotic; rather, these are the most self-contained scenes in the whole story. Whenever the action moves outside of the bedroom, I find myself reading scenes that have way too many characters and too many inferences to past events. I look up the connected books to this one, and it turns out that there is only one story that takes place before it. I’ve no idea, therefore, how things become so meta and self-referential so fast in just the second entry of the series.
In the end, it takes a bit more work than I’d have liked to read and appreciate this thing, especially when the pay-off is a story that I’ve read many times before, and there isn’t much done by the author to make this one stand out from other stories with similar premise and character archetypes. Sure, there are the sexy times, but I personally find the action to be a bit on the “enthusiastic but unintentionally hilarious” side.
I’ve seen some porn and I’ve seen a lot of shots of dicks, but never have I seen a more beautiful dick than his. I can’t take my eyes off it. I stare at his dick as it bobs up and down when he walks toward me, and the more I stare, the wetter I get.
I can’t help it, I giggle at the whole thing.
On the whole, I feel that Lance is on the unpolished side. For a second story in a series, it comes off like a late entry in a long-running series, full of references to other couples and various secondary characters that seem to be here just to announce their upcoming stories. This makes the narrative, which has more running sentences than I normally prefer, even harder to follow at times. That’s why I like the hot scenes—for once, I can focus on just the two of them, and sometimes they do hot things, but for the most part, they do things that make me chuckle.
Chalk this one as an example of a story that would have been elevated if it had had more sex and less plot.
