The Dark Garden by Eden Bradley
I had the pleasure of meeting Eden Bradley in Dallas at the RWA conference. She was charming and beautiful. I couldn’t wait to get home and dig into The Dark Garden. The tasteful erotic cover grabbed me the blurb held me.
(Blurb)
Rowan Cassidy likes to be in charge—especially in her personal life. As a mistress at Club Privé, the most exclusive bondage/S & M club on the West Coast, Rowan can live out her dominant fantasies safely, and with complete control—until the night Christian Thorne walks in. Self-confident and sophisticated, he’s a natural dominant if Rowan’s ever seen one. Yet she can’t stop thinking about him and imagining his touch.
Christian has returned home, hoping to break free from his dissatisfaction and malaise—and discovers the cure in Rowan. He’s dying to get his skilled hands on her and watch her surrender, to unlock the mystery of her that captivates him. Determined to be her master, he makes Rowan a daring proposition: give herself over to him for thirty days.
Rowan finds Christian’s offer terrifying—and impossible to resist. But abandoning herself to Christian’s power might be more than she can handle…. Or it might be the realization of her true nature and the dark garden within her. There will be only one way to find out. And once the game has begun, there’s no turning back.
The heroine’s journey to better understand herself and her needs was done with taste and elegance. The combination of two strong leads and fiery passion had me hooked from the page one. The secondary characters held my attention as well and I found myself rooting for all involved, hoping it would all work out in the end. BDSM for me is hit and miss. Eden Bradley handled it with finesse and in a way that has me on the edge of my seat awaiting her next book—The Darker Side of Pleasure.
