"Let's play, Honey!"
Reviewed by Bharti C
Posted June 17, 2024
Romance Contemporary | Romance Erotica Sensual
HONEY CUT is book 2 in the Lyonness Trilogy by author Sierra Simone. The story is an MMF trope revolving around Mark Trevenna. He is a former CIA and currently owns a popular kink club whose membership is sought after by people in powerful positions around the USA and the world. Book 1 follows Mark and Tristan, former military and current bodyguard of Mark. Salt Kisses is about Mark and Tristan becoming lovers and the ends with Mark sending him via sea, to fetch his would-be bride Isolde from Ireland.
Isolde is a banking empire princess, also niece to her uncle who holds a powerful position in the Vatican church. Banking is the world she is brought up in, groomed for and knows how to hold her own amongst the powerful people of the world. She also secretly works for the church via her uncle when her dream of becoming a nun was not meant to be. She's in her early 20s and has been engaged to Mark since she was 18. In the church, God holds a prime place in Isolde's life and gets her first loyalty and priority too.
Mark is a powerful person, professionally and personally too, after all, he is a dominant who also owns a much sought-after kink club. He has his priorities in place and his enemies in his vision. Every move he makes is strategic and oozes power. Even his sexual chemistry with Isolde and Tristan is heavy on the powerplay. Tristan is a curious character, he seems so passive on the surface hiding a sea of emotions and intense love and lust for both Mark and Isolde.
He is loyal to them both. He yearns, desires and grabs any crumbs of attention he gets from them. He just can't help himself to take from Isolde. Book 2 is them falling for each other and both realising they love Mark too. While it sounds like a love triangle it is not exactly love between them. They're all playing theory roles and working towards their hidden agendas except Tristan who is hopelessly in love with both.
Honey Cut is a complicated equation in terms of its characters given they are in positions where it might look easy for them to announce their love or list for the other. It is anything but easy as Mark and Isolde get married. Isolde's reasons for getting married, Tristan getting caught in their web of hidden agendas. Isolde is like a rose, her every love is like honey, sweet on the surface but inside she is tearing herself apart with the hurt and guilt she feels.
Everything she does from church work to her growing physical intimacy with the men is entwined with pleasure and punishment. Her praying and punishing herself every time she's intimate with either of the men is so reminiscent of how a devout person worships. There are prayers, confessions, cries for forgiveness, self-flagellation and the urgency to bleed to feel clean. In a nutshell, that's Isolde in her every action.
Between all the kink, sex and club scenes between the 3 it's all about power and how they hold on to it. It's Mark and Isolde dealing in secrets and negotiating their next move like a game of chess. Isolde prioritising her church work, Mark avenging the wrongs done in his former life and to an extent by the church.
Honey Cut is a game of love and power where the currency is sex and secrets. Like life, here too, the characters are surprised by the power and unexpected intensities of their love for each other which somehow rule their decisions ultimately.
SUMMARY
The second in the Lyonesse trilogy, following Tristan, Isolde, and Mark further into the forbidden as they wrestle with their love for each other and the growing secrets that surround them.
"He thinks I'll destroy him. It's hard to love someone you know is actually a knife pressed against your throat.
I should know."
Isolde Laurence is an uncommon bride.
She's been raised to do as her father told her, put elegance and duty above all else—but unbeknownst to him, her loyalty has shifted. Now she's in service to the Church, one of the elite spies who work for her uncle, a cardinal. Her latest assignment from the Church? Marry Mark Trevena, the owner of a notorious club in DC where the rich and powerful come to play, and seduce him.
But what was supposed to be a simple lie has become far more complicated: Isolde has fallen for Mark's handsome and emotionally wounded bodyguard, Tristan. Even worse—she's falling for her future husband himself, a mistake she made once before and has bitterly regretted ever since.
And there's something far darker at play than the machinations of Isolde's uncle or even the twisted longings of her own heart. Because Isolde's new husband has secrets of his own, and the reason he'll stop at nothing to possess Isolde and Tristan both might tear all three of them to pieces.
If the heartbreak doesn't do the job first…
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