Embraced by Blood by Laurie London

Embraced by Blood by Laurie London

My rating: 4 of 5 flames

In the second full-length Sweetblood novel by Laurie London, we see Lily losing her sense of smell. For a tracker, that’s like a bloodhound that can’t smell.

Lily feels her identity is so strongly attached to her title, Class A Tracker (best of the best), that she has been faking it so no one would notice. Unfortunately, while she’s pretending everything’s a-okay, her partner, and trainee gets kidnapped by Darkbloods. And Lily sees that if she’d spoken up sooner, maybe he wouldn’t have been taken. Alfonso sees that her partner was taken because the Darkbloods thought he was Lily. (her partner was driving her car,so he was mistaken for Lily)

So this book picks up about a year after Bonded by Blood ends, and there is also a novella Hidden by Blood (it released on June 1) that is right before this book- and while Lily is in the novella, it’s not necessary to the storyline. But yeah, anyways, a year later, we see Alfonso is still trying to redeem his past deeds, and for some reason, he feels that if he can rebuild his parents’ mansion from Spain, maybe, just maybe, his brother Dom will see that he did care about their parents too. He regrets what happened. His brother has no idea how it affected Alfonso, and never cared to learn. Dom is kind of an ass in this book, but I liked him anyways.

But with Alfonso, he has a blood assassin out to kill him, and that was a really cool concept! However, Alfonso doesn’t want Lily anywhere near him with this killer out after him. That was why he originally left and stayed out of her life.

Lily, meanwhile is losing her tracking skills that make her the Class A tracker she is. Unfortunately being a super hot woman with a daddy at the top of the agency only makes her feel like people will think she got the job because of daddy. She’s worked hard to get to the top, and losing her sense of smell is like losing her identity. So if she’s not a tracker, who is she?

But the Darkbloods are trying to convert Trackers to the Dark(blood) Side (he he, bad joke) and Lily is numero uno on their list. So Alfonso starts tracking Lily. You know, to keep her safe and stuff since he’s a tortured hero alpha male who has to deny himself but still protect his woman 😉

A lot of those kind of situations happen that force the sexual tension to ratchet up, and I liked it a lot. What I didn’t like was the way their first sexual encounter since they’d split up happened. I can’t tell more since it would be spoilery, but I really thought that all those lovely little opportunities where the tension was crazy hot would have been a better first time.

But, the Darkbloods are trying to get more and more organized than just grabbing humans off the street and draining them. Capturing and turning a Tracker was one way. A video game was another. The video game concept as a way to draw recruits was pretty cool. And watching Alfonso try to play video games was hysterical! There’s a scene where Alfonso meets Stephen, Lily’s ex, and it is so funny. But my favorite part was at the end, where Lily’s dad finally sees her. Not looks at her, but sees who she is, and how she’s the best in her field. It was very touching and started making up for the way he’d treated her.

There’s a little twist at the end, that while I really liked it, I don’t feel it was necessary. I gave the book that “too easy” type of feel to it. **Spoiler Lily’s daughter is also Alfonso’s daughter, and he already loved the little girl when he thought she wasn’t his. I like how it tied in his earlier power of teleporting, and I like how it got Stephen out of the picture, I liked the twist! I just didn’t think it was necessary, that’s all.

I really enjoyed this latest installment in the Sweetblood series and I hope you guys will too.

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