Rating: 4.5 ‘Bez’ Stars

Publisher: Paulina Ian-Kane

Genre: Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Mental Illness (DID), Opposites Attract, Romance, Series, Violence

Length: 346 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

Blurb –

Lori Boone has always been unapologetically and shamelessly himself.

Petite, with soft curls and plump lips, he’s often underestimated. Until he parts those lips and the sassiness comes out.

He thrives in uncomfortable situations and plots petty revenge in his free time. Facts that don’t change even when he starts working for a prestigious law firm and under Gabriel Reed, his best friend’s brother-in-law

“Tailored three-piece suits, perfectly styled blond hair, demanding presence, and cold stare.

My boss.

Ugh.

Well, he’s my boss’s boss’s boss, so I don’t see him much. But when we do cross paths . . . nothing.

He barely acknowledges me despite my repeated attempts to get under his skin. I’m head-turning gorgeous, catching his sharp, silver eyes shouldn’t be this hard.

I don’t hide my deep dislike for him, and my outrageous antics should get me fired, but they barely illicit a reaction.

Everything changes after I stalk him—it has become a hobby of sorts—and end up drugged, desperate, and in need of rescue, only to be saved and more by…Gabe!

I know. Bonkers, right?

Even more if you add to the mix my tendency toward sexsomnia and his multiplicity, things that set our worlds on fire.

I always thought I’d never settle for one man. More than one? Too crowded.

But what if two men share one body?

They might be exactly what I need.”

WARNING-This is not a sci-fi angel story, unless you see eager vigilantes with a dark side as angels.

This is an action packed, dark themed, enemies to lovers romance with an HEA.
It features an impish, unapologetically sassy, persistent twink and a unfazed, controlled lawyer boss with multiplicity.
There is one dub-con scene between the MCs when one of them is drugged (please don’t buy it if you think it might put you off or trigger you). There’s also a scene with sexsomnia.
Violence, blood, torture (only of very bad people), dark humor, a band of foster-brothers ready to help and very bad driving.
Morality’s grey area is quite stretched in this story. Please check the more detailed triggers at the beginning of the book.

This is book four in the Angels of Wrath Series. Each book follows a different couple.

Review –

As with the other books before it, there’s a quickie prologue that tells a little about what Gabe went through after he was kidnapped and experimented on in a secret facility two decades prior. The reader finds out during the prologue that Gabe has DID. Unlike his foster brothers who had also been in the facility, his condition was there before he was kidnapped, not as a result of it. It took years of various types of therapy for Gabe to be able live cohesively with his alter, and to become who he is in the present.

Gabe is an attorney who recently hired Ollie’s best friend Lori, who was introduced in Six (Angels of Wrath, #2). Gabe is actually Lori’s boss’s boss’s boss. Gabe is super stiff, stoic. So much so that his brothers jokingly call him C3PO because he’s so robotic and comes across as unfeeling and unbothered. Gabe hasn’t been as out there as his brothers up until now. He’s mostly stayed in the background. He always looks so… unfeeling, with a blank look on his face. This has Lori thinking he’s a stuck-up pompous jerk.

Lori has never been in the background a day in his life. He’s flashy and flamboyant, and really couldn’t care less what anybody thinks about him. He wears his makeup and his flashy clothes, and if people don’t like it, he’s not bothered by it unless they make something out of it. If they do, he doesn’t hesitate to handle things. He’s independent, and doesn’t need anybody jumping in and saving him.

Or so he thought.

People are being drugged at a local club, Crimson. The drug causes some pretty intense side effects. It makes the person super aroused, to the point of severe pain.

“There seems to be only two ways to take the pain away, a strong sedative or… pleasure.”

Gabe goes to the club in hopes of finding out who is putting the drug out there so he and his brothers – avenging angels of sorts – can put an end to it. Well, Lori being Lori, he follows Gabe and ends up getting drugged himself.

You can guess what happens next. Gabe won’t let anybody near Lori, and he handles the problem himself. Or should I say he and Bez, his alternate personality handle the problem.

“He doesn’t need a friend, just a dick to bounce on. And Gabe is a real dick.” ~Uri

I liked Bez. A lot. While Gabe was quiet and somewhat emotionless most of the time, Bez was the complete opposite. Growing up, Bez would come out and handle the bad things. Gabe was an expert with knives, and didn’t hesitate to deal with the donors, or should I say the bad guys, with those knives. He’s methodical and patient. Bez, on the other hand, has no problem being violent and playing dirty, and there’s nothing patient about him.

He’s what psychiatrists call the protector, while I’m the core identity. He takes charge in the event of real or perceived danger, physical or emotional. But it rarely happens these days.

~

Bez and I are completely opposite. He’s impulsive, boisterous, irrepressible, remorseless, relentless, and with no care for rules or anybody but himself. His only purpose is to protect us.

Bez has wanted Lori since day one, while Gabe, on the other hand, has barely tolerated him.

He. Likes. Lori. When he never likes anybody. He can barely stand me and I’m his headmate. I cannot figure out why Bez is interested in him. I know he wants to fuck him, but there’s more.

What I liked the most about Bez and Gabe is how both personalities were aware of the other. No, not just aware. They actually talked to each other in their head, and were able to easily switch back and forth between them, with the other one being completely aware of it and able to feel the same things. Because I don’t know a lot about DID, I did some research and learned about co-fronting and co-consciousness, which totally applies to Bez and Gabe. Gabe’s brothers and mothers have always known that Bez exists, have even interacted with him over the years, though he’s not a fan of the family. Apparently they’re boring. 🙂

“Bez and I switch without amnesia happening or dissociation in memory. We are both in control of the body at the same time to varying degrees. We try to give each other what we need and find compromises.”

The reader knows about the DID long before Lori does.

After the night at the club, Lori can’t stop thinking about Gabe, even has sexual dreams about him. Gabe can’t stop thinking about Lori either, but he stays away from him. He knows how much Lori hates him, and the last thing he wants to do is throw it in his face that he, Gabe, was the one who had to help him the night he was drugged. Lori finally pushes the issue, and forces Gabe to talk to him. This is when Gabe allows the door to open a little on a relationship.

I absolutely loved these guys together. Gabe is super protective of Lori, who’s determined to prove that he can take care of himself. My favorite parts of the book are when Bez comes out to play, especially after Gabe finally tells Lori about him.

Lori, like all the other significant others in the previous books who learned about their men, doesn’t freak out over Gabe’s DID. If anything, he embraces it because it makes sense in how Gabe has acted up to now. Lori loves when Bez is rough and dirty, but he also loves when Gabe is sweet and loving; once he allows himself to feel anyway.

Everybody else calls Lori Gremlin. Bez calls him Little Wasp. That’s how the reader knows it’s him in the beginning. After a while, it’s easy to tell the difference between him and Gabe.

That smart mouth. I’ve never believed in demonic possession, but I might have to revise my opinion on the matter because Lori is… A little wasp, Bez reminds me. If Satan ever summoned him to hell, he’d go with a pleased smirk and act like he owns the place.

Describing their unique relationship is difficult, and likely doesn’t make any sense in this review. Bez and Gabe go back and forth once Lori is aware of Bez. It’s kind of funny at one point because Lori has to remind Gabe that Bez is part of him, created by him, when Gabe gets jealous of his alternate personality.

“How can you be jealous of an identity that you created?”

There’s a lot of other stuff happening in the background. There are two attorneys, brothers, who have caused issues with Lori at the firm. There’s also a guy who attacks Lori in the parking garage and later stalks him. There’s still no known identity of the elusive Phoenix, who is responsible for the beating deaths of teens, and now the distribution of the drugs at the nightclub. There’s Wednesday, Lori’s kleptomaniac hen, who drives Gabe crazy and who Bez adores. There’s a temporary PA of Gabe’s, who treats Lori horribly, and won’t relay any of Lori’s messages to Gabe. He wants to scratch her eyes out. The feeling is mutual. It’s this woman and something she does that actually forces Gabe to realize how bad he, not just Bez, wants Lori.

There are also all the brothers and their side thing, meting out justice when the law won’t or can’t, re: the angels of wrath thing.

Of all the books in this series so far, this one surprised me the most. Unlike the three before it, it wasn’t a constant sex-fest, as Gabe and Lori took time to figure things out. They genuinely hated each other, so they had to get past that. It wasn’t so full of exclamation points that I wanted to throw my Kindle. They were there, just not all over the place. The series is already so unrealistic that I figured it would be more of the same because one of the characters has DID. Surprisingly, it was quite good.

I’ve been grumbling about the length of these books since I read the first one. I have to say that this one read so well that I didn’t feel like it was 346 pages. This is the first one of the four that I had a problem putting down once I started reading it.

All the guys in this series have the quickest recovery times known to man. We’re talking multiple orgasms in a matter of minutes.

I already mentioned the drug at the club and what the ‘fix’ was. When I read that, I was thinking, “Here we go with page after page of sex.” I’m glad to say I was wrong. I’m all about sex scenes in books, the more graphic the better sometimes, but this series has so much sex in it that I wanted to skim in all of the books except this one. They were written well for Gabe and Lori.

Overall, I seriously loved this. I loved getting inside Gabe’s head. I loved Bez most of the time, even when he was being a little obnoxious. Lori wasn’t as annoying as I expected him to be after seeing him in the other books. He was fiesty, but he was actually a really good character.

This does end on a couple of cliffhangers. One has to do with Meg, one of their mothers, and the other is something to do with Uri. The cliffhangers leave nothing hanging with Gabe and Lori. They get their HEA.

4.5 stars, and my favorite in the series so far. I was not a fan of Three, the book before this one, so I’m really glad I didn’t give up on the series.