#Throwback: Madeleine, Abducted

She was meant to be his destruction…
A pawn played in a perilous game between father and son…
Yet, her strength was more than either man could imagine.
As Maddy learns to save herself…
She becomes the one thing that could set the son free.

Madeleine Clark was raised to become a concert cellist. Sheltered and naïve, she remains hidden behind her music, a protection from the world around her. On the night of her first solo performance, Maddy accepts the admiration of a stranger and finds herself captive in a cruel and twisted power struggle between a sadistic father and his son, Aaron.

Seemingly dangerous and uncaring, Aaron manages the business operations of his father’s estate. Wanting nothing to do with the slaves kept at the Estate, Aaron refuses to take part in the deeper depravities of his father. Despite his resistance, Aaron’s father ‘gifts’ him with a petite, brunette woman he can’t refuse.

A bond forged in conspiracy and deceit, Aaron struggles to save Maddy by teaching her to survive in the world in which he’d been raised. An unlikely union, Aaron soon learns that great strengths can exist within small packages, while Madeleine learns that love and light can exist in the darkest of places.

I am a fan of the dark love story.  I mean, once in a while you need to just read something that isn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows…sometimes you need to be stabbed by that romance unicorn (which would be a GREAT name for a  book blog…just sayin’).  Madeleine Abducted is just the dark tale you need to satisfy the part of your psyche that wants something twisted every so often.

Madeleine is an introverted cellist.  One night she is abducted by a crime boss who gives her to his son as his slave.  Aaron is now Madeleine’s owner, and while there are parts of him captivated by her talent and beauty, he can’t allow that to show in an effort to keep her from being broken by his father and his men.  Can true love blossom out of such tragic beginnings? 

What I liked about this book was that it wasn’t safe.  There were definitely some situations and scenes and this book that push the comfort envelope.  I liked the Aaron, and there were things about Madeleine that I liked as well.  What I didn’t like about the book, however, was the whole sheltered, skittish virgin thing.  I mean…we’ve been here SO many times before.  Plus, I also can’t imagine the kind of psychological damage that this situation would have on Madeleine, and I didn’t exactly feel like that aspect of the story was fleshed out. 

The plot was also very predictable for me.  There wasn’t some crazy, dark twist either, and I found myself knowing pretty early on how it was all going to come together.  But, I am intrigued by the other books in this series and will give those a go.  This isn’t a bad book, but I’m not sure it’s one that’s really going to stick out for me as time passes.  3 stars.

 

This is a book that I’ve wanted to read for a while but never got around to it. Needless to say, when the review opportunity came up, I was all over it. And now that I’ve finished reading Madeleine Abducted I don’t know how to write the review.

From the first chapter, Madeleine’s fragility is apparent. She’s that friend that you do your best to shelter because she’s too sweet, too naïve, and too vulnerable that you don’t want her exposed to the wrongs of the world because you like how genuine she is. That she is abducted on the night of her first public performance, after actively avoiding them for so long, made me want to rail at the universe. But her abduction is only the beginning of her descent into hell and what follows is a terrifying tale of physical, mental, and sexual abuse as Maddy learns that her worst fears were not the worst things that could ever happen to her. But within her new world, she finds someone to cling to … her Master. Maddy’s reliance upon Aaron aka Master isn’t because of Stockholm syndrome as much as it is a case of the lesser of the evils surrounding her. That he wasn’t directly responsible for her abduction and had no desire to make her his slave, made it easier for her to trust him.

Make no mistake, even though Aaron wasn’t interested in making her his slave does not mean that he isn’t a bad man, because he is, just in a different way. Aaron was put in a precarious situation where he was forced to train Maddy even though he didn’t want to because if he didn’t, one of his father’s men would and he knew that she wouldn’t survive it. While Maddy was the abductee, I found myself feeling sorry for Aaron for what he had to do to insure Maddy’s safety. While I anticipated that Maddy would help heal Aaron’s darkness (not cure it though) and that Aaron would help Maddy become stronger, I found myself thrown for loop after loop by the evil machinations of Aaron’s father. I felt Aaron, Maddy, and Xander’s pain each and every time someone knocked on Aaron’s door because you just never knew what that madman had up his sleeve. Madeleine Abducted is dark erotica and Ms. Willis proves once again that she cannot only write really hot sex scenes, but that she can create characters who share an intense connection in spite of the circumstances. Madeleine Abducted is a great start to The Estate series and cannot wait to read the rest of the series. Despite how much I gleefully enjoyed his demise, I am looking forward to reading Joseph Fallen to learn what events created the madman. 

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