Rating: 1 star

Florist Gwen Dubois hasn’t been sleeping well. Plagued by dreams of a mystery male who uses her body, overcoming her protests and imposing orgasm after orgasm upon her until she jolts awake, she is – at the very least – unsure of what to think of herself, and of these dreams. She’s always been ‘normal’. Always slept well. Always had ‘normal’ dreams. And now this, out of the blue.

The only logical explanation – and Gwen is nothing if not logical – is that her dreams have been caused by her unconscious imaginings of Marc, a French horticulturist she has been corresponding with about out-of-season- plants found in a nearby forest. Marc and she have been becoming close, and he is due to stop in on his way to a nearby conference to meet her and personally view the plants.

Marc shows up and they start to fall for each other, but then the plot takes a twist. The mystery male from Gwen’s dreams is not Marc, and he quite decidedly does not want to share. Now Gwen must choose between the man of her dreams, or the man from her dreams …

This book made me grind my teeth. The plot in and of itself was a good springboard but the resolution fell flat; when the mystery man delivered an ‘or else’ there was no ‘or else’, there was just a fizzle.

What offended me the most was that as per the plot the female lead was raped repeatedly on a nightly basis for an extended period of time, then expected to just ‘get over it’. Instead, the major conflict is between Marc and Gwen...and whether or not Gwen will ever come to terms with the existence of magic in the world.
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ISBN: 978-0-451-41268-3
Publication date March 2009, through Onyx