Dan­ger­ous Games (Tempt­ing Seals, Book 2)by Lora Leigh leaves much to be desired…because it lacks an orig­i­nal sto­ry­line and lik­able char­ac­ters. The first page was a red flag for me when we are intro­duced to the two protagonists. All I thought was not again, not another  “I love my best friends sis­ter story.” Clint “Iceman” McIntyre, who is a Navy SEAL, is best friends with Morganna’s brother, Reno. I guess Reno had his own book that I have no inten­tions of ever track­ing down.

At a party, Clint spots Mor­ganna and he starts hav­ing an unwanted, sex­ual attrac­tion towards her. Yet, Morganna grows up, chooses to be a law offi­cer with the DEA no less and moves on with her life since Clint can’t see past her being a kid. That is part of the con­flict in their rela­tion­ship. The other part is that it doesn’t mat­ter if Mor­ganna was fifty, Clint would only con­tinue see her as a kid. They’d been friends since he was 11 years old. She was in diapers.

Of course, alpha Clint has “bag­gage” that keeps him occu­pied in self-loathing. He had shitty par­ents grow­ing up. He doesn’t want chil­dren of his own for fear of turn­ing into his father. His feel­ings for Mor­ganna is con­flict­ing and con­tra­dic­tory at times. He doesn’t want to be with her but can’t stand life with­out her. WTF? I hate these types of con­flicts. It makes no sense what­so­ever. They argue, fight and fuck for most of the book. The other sub­plots were sub­terfuge. The real action was in the bed­room, my friends. The date rape under­cover sce­nario didn’t hold a can­dle to the action in the bedroom. Didn’t make a lick of sense but I guess it didn’t have to since the real focus of the story was see­ing Clint get Mor­ganna in bed. Despite all her feisty, vocif­er­ous objec­tions.  After which I just started reading/skimming.

What went wrong? Well, the char­ac­ters for one. Didn’t much like them. Did I buy that they loved each other? Hell no. Did I buy that Mor­ganna would be a DEA agent? Hell, no. Their rela­tion­ship was another prob­lem. The con­stant tug­ging back and forth of Clint’s feel­ings was annoying. Repetitive phrases…these two seem to feel every­thing “soul” deep: If she left it would “wound his soul.” So many times she seared “his soul.” To leave her behind it would “destroy his soul.” LOL. You get the pic­ture. Oh, sheesh. Enough already.

I see many, many read­ers enjoy­ing this title. The prob­lem for me is that I’ve been there and done that and I have the T-shirt. It’s a rather old T-shirt at that.  I quit read­ing nov­els like this for a rea­son: they are uno­rig­i­nal. Unfor­tu­nately, Leigh doesn’t add any­thing to the plot to make this one read any dif­fer­ent from the other r/s in the pack. Unfor­tu­nately, she doesn’t add any­thing to make it stand out either. Clint is a big, bad alpha male with devi­ous sex­ual appetites; many read­ers will just love that. He’s also a dom. He also has a pierc­ing that many may think is hot but I was like: hmmm. Inter­est­ing. Any­way, I skim/read to the fin­ish line and can hap­pily say that this will be my last foray into Ms. Leigh’s world of Navy SEALs and Breeds (as I have read one of those, too.). I was really hop­ing to like this one since it had a half-way decent premise that sparked a bit of inter­est in me but alas, I did not so I will say, skip this one unless your already a fan. There’s an audi­ence for this, but I am not one of them. Unfortunately, I will have to agree with Ellen’s review at AAR. Go read it.

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