“Please by my vampire wife, mmmmkay?”

Valerie Moyer is kidnapped and held captive in a basement with several other women. She frees herself and manages to call 911 before jumping out of a window. Anders (his first name will be addressed a little later) is an Immortal who works to contain other immortals who rick exposing themselves and all their kind by preying on humans for blood.  Anders and his team respond to Valerie’s 911 call and our romance is off to the races.

This book was boring as hell. If hell is boring. When Anders meets Valerie he can’t read her mind and this means that she is a potential life mate for him. And that’s that for Anders. He is utterly convinced that she is the one for him because the nanobots that make him immortal have decided she’s great (no joke, that’s the vampire mythology, they all have nanobots). All he does is be really, really nice to her and eventually tell her that they are meant to have super hot, pass out for hours after you screw, life mate sex, and be totally into each other for the rest of eternity. “Please by my vampire wife, mmmmkay?” He has zero personality because he has zero internal conflict.  No doubt, no struggle. He accepts his fate and doesn’t have a particularly difficult time convincing Valerie to go along with it.

Anders’ first name is Semen, which is a pretty great joke until she starts calling him “Semmy” in the heat of passion. When I picture a tall, dark, and handsome immortal vampire lover, that is not a name that comes to mind. “Sem,” “Anders,” “Baby?” Something even remotely sexy. Any name that was not off putting. Semmy is what you call a kid when you are his parent and you are trying to embarrass him in front of his friends.

Valerie is pretty damn awesome. Most of the time.  She frees herself and her fellow captives from the vampire who is using them as food using her wits and her courage. She never waits for a man to help her, she helps herself competently and with courage. She is smart, capable, & professionally successful. Which is why it if frustrating as hell when she wakes up after escaping from a vampire and nearly dying from blood loss and she is not in a hospital she just takes the word of everyone around her that she is at a “safe house.” She never asks for badges or identification. She doesn’t try to contact anyone, she just accepts everyone’s word for what is going on. I hate it when a character is really smart for most of  a book but is selectively stupid for no good reason.

Anders is a Canadienne’s idea of a perfect man. He is polite and thoughtful. He remembers that you need poop bags and dog food and doesn’t need to shove it in your face when he remembers to get them for you. He likes ice cream and hot sex in the pool. This is all great, but there is a crazy, kidnapping, blood sucking (the good vampires just drink blood from blood banks) vampire out there to be caught. The mystery of who that guy is and how to catch him isn’t even really addressed until the last quarter of the book. The main characters of a romance are deathly boring when you are skipping hot action to get to the find the bad guy parts.

This book has some great facets. The heroine is realistically kick ass. It’s got realistic treatment of a dog – they keep having to get up early in the morning to let the dog out, which is a drag for a vampire but he does it for love! There are some laugh out loud funny jokes. There is just no romantic tension. There is never a question of if they are going to get together or should they get together, they never even really discuss it. Anders never tells Valerie what becoming his life mate would entail i.e. that he is going to turn her into a vampire. The plot about the vampire kidnapper had potential but the author didn’t flesh it out enough to be interesting.

This book is number 18 in the Argeneau book series. I haven’t read any of the other books. I gathered from the Amazon reviews that there are a ton of cameos from other books. The roll call of people dropping in and out was numbing. There is a barbeque at one point. I think she spent two pages just describing who was sitting at what side of the table.. I couldn’t follow who was who or what who was doing and there was a whole plot contrivance with a misplaced cell phone that was impossible to follow.