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Review: Carrie Lane’s Before Cate (Cat Haus)

Before Cate

Before CateBook contains scenes of a sexual nature

Two years after a great tragedy in his life, John Hamilton thinks he has finally met “the one” and her name is Cate. She is clever, funny, beautiful, everything he ever wanted from his girl. There’s only one problem. She’s everyone else’s girl too as she is a working girl at the Cat Haus, the best known brothel in Nevada.

How they meet and get together is a story in itself, as John travels to Las Vegas to close a business deal and ends up in a poker game where a night with the best girl of Gus Haus, owner of the Cat Haus, becomes the prize. One thing leads to another that night, and continues to another card game/business meeting a few weeks later, where he finds himself left with a whole lot more than he bargained for as the winner this time. So how do John and Cate cope when they are thrown together in much more than a one night stand? Can she deal with him being there as she works and does it cause him problems to see her with so many others when he only wants her for himself?

Yes, this is a steamy book. The sex scenes are graphic but very well written, erotic without being either over romantic or kinky, just good, well-described vanilla sex. That aspect of the story aside, I really enjoyed the fact that this book was written from the man’s point of view as so many books of these style are very feminine, concentrating on the romance of the situations rather than the practicalities and problems. Sure there were romantic moments, just as there were highly sexual moments, but the first person narrative dwelt a lot more on what John thought about the things he was seeing and feeling as the story progressed and it was a very refreshing change of pace to more or less get rid of the hearts and flowers. All the characters were well developed and believable and I was rooting for things to go well for John and Cate from the start. Although the ending is predictable, the story flowed easily and was engaging throughout, complete and self contained without any extra padding. I found this to be a very satisfying book, easy to pick up and would be ideal to read on holiday. I am glad though that I got the e-book version and not the paperback as the cover image was typical of an erotic novel and I wouldn’t say that this was a typical erotic novel at all.

This is the first of Carrie Lane’s books that I’ve read and I know that the whole Cat Haus story is also available from Cate’s point of view, so it would be very interesting to see how much difference there is in how the main characters viewed the situations they encounter.

**** 4 STARS!!!

Lizzie

Amazon CarrieLaneWrites.com

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