Delighted Reader

Tucker Fall’s is the first book in a trilogy about the owners of Purgatory, a BDSM club. Very few people know these men own the club and they like to keep it that way. There is a mystery in all their pasts that I think will slowly reveal itself over time as you get hints of it in this first book.

Maggie Cisco returns to her hometown after being detained during a BDSM club raid. Now jobless and recently divorced over the incident, she just wants to lick her wounds in private. Years of research is down the drain, but she hopes to redeem herself with a memoir on her research of the alternative lifestyle of BDSM. Knowing she is submissive, she pushes all her desires deep down inside and tries to pick up the pieces of her life.

When Maggie gets stuck in a snowstorm, she takes a ride from a man from her past the opens her eyes wide. One shared kiss when they were teenagers has stuck in her mind over the years, but fear of being hurt again makes her want to curl into herself.

Tucker has craved Maggie’s submission since high school, but life didn’t go the way he wants. Now he is a billionaire living in seclusion in their hometown, he’s hiding from the world and the Dom inside. Tucker knows the moment Maggie comes back home and does all his homework to find out where she has been. Now he wants to bring out her submissive side he is longing to cultivate. When he rescues Maggie from the snow storm, he makes her a proposition. Become his submissive and he will teach her everything she has longed to do in her research, but never had a partner to do it with.

The first scene the two do is very intense for both me and the heroine in the story. Tucker uses orgasm denial to bring her to a fever pitch that left me even panting. But all the emotions she feels scare her into bolting. Add on top of that some embarrassment for coming apart as hard as she did causes her to have what is basically subdrop. The emotions are intense and left me wondering just how you get over it. Of course that is part of aftercare, being held and brought back to reality slowly.

Tucker is also an artist and he paints a picture of Maggie at one point that is so vivid in my imagination. His true passion is glass work, which at the time of the year was too cold for him to do. His sister runs the local diner in town and we see her a lot when Maggie goes there to regroup several times. Their past with their father seems to have been harsh and shaped a lot of who they are now, which is very hardened and tough.
Maggie and Tucker have a lot of emotional baggage to get over in the course of their story. Some of it not so bad to overcome and other parts that could almost be devastating. Secrets are slowly revealed while others are hinted at and make you want to shake Ms. Gayle to find it all out!

While I loved the characters, there were parts that I wanted to shake these characters to make them realize what they were doing. You get a hint that Tucker wants a 24/7 BDSM relationship, but you never get far enough to see how they will work out their future. I guess we can only hope to see some more of them in the next two books in the trilogy.

A great weaving of delightfully wicked BDSM scenes, with a story that gets out of the bedroom too. Side characters who you want to learn more about, along with a mystery that will have me grabbing the next book in the series.

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read this book.