Review: Switch It Up – Sara Brookes
Switch It Upby Sara Brookes
Series: Noble House Kink #2
Publisher: Carina Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2018
Genres: Romance
Pages: 368
Source: NetGalley
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
My rating:
Welcome to Noble House, Where Your Passion is Our Pleasure, and Someone is Always Watching…
Hacker Madeline Zane gets off on crossing lines. So when she discovers security flaws in the Noble House website, she thinks nothing of showing up at the door of the hybrid fetish club and demanding an audience with the owner. Especially after watching an intense online scene of the notorious Dom bringing a submissive to her knees.
Kochran Duke is weary of always being in control, but meeting Maddy rekindles his pleasure in what had become strictly business. And instead of making him jealous, seeing her submit to his old friend Ezra has him aching for something he didn’t even know he was searching for.
The kind of heartbreak Ezra’s lived through changes a man. Maddy makes him crave a life he thought he’d put behind him for good. Watching her with Kochran only fuels his desires, rousing the caged beast within.
Fortunately at Noble House, virtually any fantasy can become reality.
I would never have thought I would enjoy kinky menage romances, but, well, here I am. After gobbling down Kit Rocha’s Beyond series, when I saw this up for request on NetGalley, I decided to see if it was just Kit Rocha or anything else. After realizing this was the second in a series, I also bought the first book and read that in an afternoon, and then promptly gobbled this one down as well. And, holy crap, are these books hot!
“Some people found pleasure in whips and chains. Madeline Zane got off on skirting the law. Laws were more like guidelines anyway. A line drawn in the sand just begging to be crossed. Maddy hadn’t yet found a single line she hadn’t been willing to leap over.”
Maddy, “badass hacker extraordinaire,” is a risk taker, a hacker who specializes in hacking into websites and then presenting recommendations to the company for how to fix the security breaches. Usually this sort of penetration testing (yes, that is what it’s actually called) is contracted by the company in advance, but Maddy also likes a little bit of illegal exploration on the side. So when she finds a Second Life-style sim on the Noble Kink website, she takes great pleasure in hacking into it. Unfortunately, she’s soon horrified when a creep tries to take advantage of the fact that the software doesn’t have a “safe word” feature. She’s so mad, in fact, that she hops in her car and drives to the Noble Kink warehouse/playground/offices, where she confronts and basically dresses down Kochran, Dom extraordinaire and king of the kingdom. He foists her off on his computer geek, Ezra, who, despite being called a “half-rate code jockey,” repeatedly, by her, is intrigued. Of course, rather than prosecuting her for her computer crimes, this all leads to Maddy landing a job helping Ezra fix the website.
“Within the span of a few hours, two men—two complete strangers—had convinced her she was absolutely safe when she was in their presence. She’d come to the club to report a security issue she’d created, the dangerous lack of a safe exit and a jerkoff preying on in- nocent submissives—she hadn’t been prepared for the unexpected pleasure from two vastly different men. Pursuing either of them would be double trouble. While Maddy loved skirting the law, she wasn’t about to put her heart up as collateral. And why the hell was she thinking about both of them? Since when had she become the poster child for polyamory?”
While Maddy is refreshingly – well, not innocent – but most definitely unexperienced in the whole lifestyle, Ezra and Kochran each have their own hangups and pasts to work through. In romances with only two main characters, it can sometimes feel like one is being shortchanged in favor of the other, but I felt like Ms. Brookes gave plenty of attention to each of the main characters and where they were coming from. And, if anything, that would be one of my main complaints – there is a lot that’s happening in this book, and it takes a while to get to the point where all three of them are together. The buildup was absolutely amazing, but one of the things I loved about the first book in the series was seeing how Grae fit in with the existing relationship between Saint and Boyce. In this book, though, there was no deep relationship between any of them when the book started, and how quickly they got to their HEA was a bit jarring. It’s not that I didn’t think their relationship would work out – I think the dynamics between the three of them were well explored and quite frankly lovely – but that I would’ve liked to see them all have more time to grow together in their relationship. As for another (minor) cons, Maddy has a habit of saying “mothertruckin'” or “mothertrucker” as a swear word. It was amusing the first time, but around the fifth time, it was enough to jar me out of the story. I have no idea why this bothered me so much, but it was weird going from “not a cuss word” to talking about ridiculously kinky things in the next sentence.
And, hoo boy, this book is seriously steamy. There’s a lot of different kinks represented (though no clowns, thank goodness), but they all worked well together. Pretty sure this is the only book I’ve read with server room sex in it (because, damn, those places are usually hot and LOUD and seriously the last place I’d want to get it on) but Ms. Brookes made it sound appealing!
I’ll definitely be picking up the next book in the series! If you like your stories kinky and steamy, this is for you!
