TEASE

Author: Suzanne Forster ISBN: 0373605064 5/2006 FICTION/EROTIC Publisher: SPICE

It's not always the one on top who has the power . . . Tess Wakefield has cooled on sex. Oh, she did the rebellious wild-child thing in college, making it a point to break all the rules -- especially the ones about sex -- and all it got her was a string of loser boyfriends and a fear of rashes. Underwhelmed by her experiences, she's happy to focus on her career and leave her vibrator in storage. Now an advertising exec, Tess has been hired by one of Madison Avenue's hottest agencies as co-creative director with wunderkind Danny Gabriel. Secretly, she's been asked to rein in his maverick style, and Tess immediately suspects Danny when someone sabotages her new campaign. But everyone in the place seems to have a secret agenda. It's a cutthroat business, and not everyone is willing to play nice with the new girl. Including Danny. His early, fervent advances are a pleasant shock to Tess, but she never imagines for a second that she'd allow him to draw her into the dark heart of the most breathtakingly erotic S&M club in Manhattan -- or that she'd be so willing to give up control and like it.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

I really don't know how I felt about Suzanne Forster's TEASE. Suzanne Forster is a very good writer, and her writing style is fluent and kept me well informed. Definitely erotic fiction, it was hot in that regard, but fell short in a couple of ways for me.

Our heroine Tess Wakefield, is a take-no-prisoners, no-holds-barred advertising exec and has just been offered the job of a lifetime. In order to get this job she has to pull up stakes and move to Manhattan, but she figures that the risk is worth it—not to mention if it doesn't work out, she can always pack up and move back home. She has been secretly assigned the job of helping hottie Danny Gabriel simmer down a bit, and as wonderful as that might be, she has no idea if she can trust him, especially when her work starts to get sabotaged. When an ornery client demands that Tess find an S & M club to shoot her ads in for their leather line, things get even weirder. We begin to see that absolutely nothing is as it seems in Manhattan—nothing.

While I truly did love the style of writing and most of the characters in TEASE, there were still a few things that I could have done without. For starters, I never quite understood what The Marquis had to do with anything. He was definitely an interesting character, but in the end he didn't really contribute much to the plot of the book. He was more like a go-between. I also thought that it was in bad taste for our little heroine, Tess, to just hand herself over to a complete stranger—one that she's terrified of, no less—to be at his beckoned call and be treated as little more than a hostage—and a naked one, at that. Her willingness to have sex with a man she never knows and always just hopes is someone else, was a bit much for me. The idea of the club was great, but I didn't expect Tess to get so involved with a stranger to the point that, at the end, I was left feeling like, what the heck just happened?

Suzanne Forster is absolutely a great author. Her writing is good and the storyline is fluent, it was just the plot that didn't sit right with me. Fans of Suzanne Forster might just love this book. While I didn't fall in love with TEASE, there was a lot to recommend this author and make me want to take a look at some of her other books.

Kristal Gorman