For the purposes of disclosure, I must admit that had I known that Love Bites was a paranormal romance, I never would have agreed to read this book. I am normally not a fan of paranormal romance, and try to avoid the genre altogether. That said, I must admit that I kind of liked the book. Yes, it had the usual boy meets girl, girl runs away from boy, and boy and girl get together storyline. It was extremely predictable for a lot of the book, but I still found it entertaining and when it comes to reading anything, the ability to hold my attention is extremely important. Unlike many paranormal romance books, I didn't find myself stopping because doing laundry seemed more interesting than reading this book.I suppose I should give you a little background now. Etienne is a three hundred year old vampire who suddenly shows up in Rachel's morgue with a gunshot directly to his heart. Immediately Rachel finds herself attracted to the corpse however she calms herself when she realizes that what she is thinking about actually amounts to necrophilia. Rachel is sick with the flu and when Etienne sits up and begins to speak to her, she believes that she is having a fever induced hallucination and promptly passes out. Days later when he arrives in her morgue yet again he burned from head to toe but this time, a man intent on finishing the job actually mortally wounds Rachel when she attempts to save Etienne from having his head shopped off. To be clear, she intervened because she thought she sensed a heart beat coming from him.When she awakes next she is in Etienne's home and he is faced with task of telling her that he has made her vampire rather than letting her die. What follows is one of the most humorous exchange that I have read in a paranormal romance book ever. With references to neck sucking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Rachel attempts to understand what has happened to her. Next comes a series of interchanges with Etienne's vampire family and I can tell you that in between the mushy lovey dovey vanilla sex, that the laughs keep coming. I really wanted to like Etienne, but I found his attempts to force Rachel to stay with him to be extremely manipulative. Rather than to help her take blood on her own he actually fed her spoiled blood so that she was be forced to rely on him for intravenous feeding. I also didn't like the fact that Etienne's cousin gave Rachel drug laced blood to encourage sex between Etienne and Rachel. When we consider how often women are slipped date rape drugs, this was uncomfortable to say the least. Even though Rachel did consent and consent enthusiastically to sex the degree to which she influenced by the drugs bothered me. When it comes to consent and sexual activity, there should never be any murky water.Read More
