A Husband's Place

That night, she left me alone, just as she promised. Yanking on my restraints, I pulled as hard as I could, trying to get free. It wasn't going to happen. I could only watch as she got ready to go out with her friends. She pulled on a gorgeous red dress, black boots, and she took off her wedding ring.

Huffing and puffing, I kept imagining a world where I would open my mouth and tell her she couldn't do this. I would shout at her, and the force of masculinity would be enough to get her to stop.

I never made the attempt, even once.

A Husband's Place

If you think it is just masculinity alone that gets your wife to do something you are in the wrong marriage.

When I started this story of a man marring a complete commanding bitch of a woman I felt sorry for him, sorry that she treated him like an animal and as a slave, and I felt the story went a bit quickly down the submissive male husband slave route.

And then I realized he wasn't completely worthy of Mistress' pity with statements like that.

I still felt I disliked her for some reason, and then I felt everything moved a tad fast for me. The spanking came on their honeymoon night, the submissive restraints and tools of her control came next, the collars, the chastity devices, and all of the other methods of control. In short, I was feeling torn on why my connection to either of these two felt lacking. You know the saying, "it's not you, it's me?" That is where I was with this book, it hit all the right submissive tones and tools, yet I felt I had a slight bit of trouble with connecting with either of them.

I need that, a connection, a reason to feel empathy for one character or another - especially in a cuckolding story such as this. Perhaps I wanted some more background on these two, their college life, their growing up, the intimate friends they had before they met each other.

The humiliation and methods of control are very good, however, and I felt the book hit all the right notes on breaking him down and making him submit. It introduced things at a quicker pace than I am used to for a cuckolding work, but it did step out the next piece of control and humiliation well enough to make each an interesting and fun progression to the story. It also was brave enough to 'go there' and move things along to the next step without pussying around too much, and I appreciated that in a faster-paced story like this.

I felt it did keep things moving and it made sense, but I felt this could have been slowed down just a little and worked (for me) much better. This is one of those subjective points, and if I like something I get this feeling of 'wanting more' and 'slow it down' so I can savor things. So if I have those feelings, for good for for bad, you have my interest and captured my imagination - which is always a good sign for a book.

Part of me feels our male protagonist was a wee bit too submissive, willing, and uninteresting. He felt like he had nothing much of an outside life, no friends at work, no important job, no 'other girl' to confide in, and nothing 'if the other people in his life found out' thing going on. I wanted him to have a life outside of this that was at risk, a reason to pay for all the wonderful things she had, and something outside the humiliation that fed into the reason why he needed to become her slave. If he was a big-shot CEO or high-stakes corporate type, I wanted to see him taken down a whole bunch of notches by her because I like these revenge and 'put him in his place' stories.

"I don't like seeing you like this," she said, talking down to me like I was some sad little creature. "Here, let me help you."

I howled out when cold stabbed into my crotch. Opening my eyes, I saw that Kate held an ice pack.

I read that at first as ice pick and I damn well nearly dropped my Kindle. Then I realized I wanted a bit more from her as well, despite my inclination to turn her from a domineering bitch to a black-widow and ice-pick wielding type figure. Darthaniel said if someone did that to him with an ice pack he would have peed all over her. I felt she was an interesting object of desire, and her methods of control worked on my feelings - I felt something for him, after all. What I wanted from her was more visuals, more of the lace stockings, subtly shaped thighs, her rose-like scent, and the curl of hair hanging between her eyes sort of thing.

When one is subject to humiliation and extreme control, one's senses are heightened. When your world becomes one person, you focus very tightly on that one person and lots of little details come out. How she walks could be a fetish all in its own to him as he sits leashed and collared. There is a juxtaposition between the things which 'set him off' and the nasty, forbidden thoughts he has about her features and what he would do if he could. Maybe he stares at how her feet fit in her shoes, and then imagines doing something with her footwear while she isn't watching. There were some very good moments with how her breath on his ear excited him, but I wanted some more show and tease in this area.

She giggled at me. It was such a beautiful, sweet, mocking sound. I could hear it. Kate wasn't laughing with me. She was laughing at me. Even so, I didn't complain.

Kate held something down against my lips.

I noted a couple issues of excess directionality with the work, and this is one of my writing hang ups as well. You know how you read something like 'stare up at her' and your mind later goes, just make it 'stare at her?' Here, we get some excess directionality issues with little things like 'she giggled at me' when 'she giggled' would have worked just as well and used less directional words and angular cues. I liken this issue to being a visual writer and subconsciously inserting those directional queues because our mind sees them. The reader should be able to fill this information in, and what happens is we provide too many excess cues that make the writing more tedious to read. Similarly, 'down against my lips' could just be 'held something to my lips' and read a lot cleaner.

When in doubt, remove directional cues and see if the action still works. If it doesn't, rewrite the action rather than add the bright neon arrows of annoying directional cues.

Also, I noticed our female lead's name was swapped from Kate to Terra in two places and it threw me for a moment that another girl was somehow involved. There was probably a name change somewhere alone the way and this needed some extra love and attention from an editoress.

Did this work for me? Well, I felt something, that I wanted more, so I am going to say yes. This was a faster-paced cuckolding book that brushes over the details and background, and just sticks to the good stuff. Now for me, it is the background and details that make all the good stuff have its impact, so there is that, and likely why I felt the things I did. But I did feel something, and the fact I wanted more puts this in the worthy reads category for me.