This must be military week for me--Roped is the second book in a row I've read that has a military hero. I don't know if it is a sign of the times or a sign of Ellora's Cave's buying strategy, but in either case, Jared McTavish, our protagonist, begins our tale in desperate circumstances by nearly dying of thirst in an Iraqi desert. By the end of the first scene, however, we find he is having reoccurring dreams in a small VA hospital in Cheyenne recovering from a roadside bomb that "ended up taking part of his right leg" and "ended what he'd planned as a lifelong career in the Marines."

Anyway, our military hero develops a tendre for his nurse. She visits his dreams.

There is more plot and character development in this book than in many of our other submissions but I found myself drifting where I should have been lingering, scanning ahead when I should have been relating to the characters. I'm not completely certain why the exposition didn't work that well for me. Perhaps it was redundant sentence sequences like this: "Her pulse raced. Her heart pounded in her chest." Perhaps it was that I felt I had to work through a lot of exposition to get to plot points, or that some of the details behind the details were placed into scenes that I felt didn't move the story forward. Rereading what I just wrote leads me to a revelation. All that means is that it could use another editing pass.

As I said, our military hero develops a tendre for his nurse; and just as he turns out to be a Dom, she turns out to be a sub. We learn this when the characters are developed separately, and we only rediscover them together when Jared accepts an invitation to a dungeon. Ninia, Jared's nurse, is at the end of four years of mourning the loss of Earl, her deceased husband. She plots to get Jared invited to a club, where they will both begin to live again.

Roped is not going to appeal to lovers of standard romance; this is more of a read designed for the dungeon club scene who can relate to the appeal of rope bondage, voyeurism, exhibitionism, body piercing, and "pleasure/pain."

Reviewed by Maîtresse
© January 2007