Megan's Mark (Breeds Series)

Megan's Mark - Lora Leigh I say I like erotic romance, but now I wonder. I don't like Lauren Dane, Maya Banks or, apparently, Lora Leigh. My claim is looking kinda baseless. More research is in order.Anyways, the book. Oh, the book.Megan's Mark starts off well. Megan Fields is an empath working as a sheriff's deputy in the nice empty New Mexico desert. The blessed lack of people and action leaves her at peace, leaving her free from the overload of feeling other people's emotions. When she checks on a SUV left in a washed out canyon, however, that quiet is gonzo.Embroiled in a shoot-out after discovering the bullet-riddled vehicle contained two dead Breeds, Megan has to make a run for it with Braden Arness, a law enforcement agent of some sort, and a lion Breed. Someone's out to kill Megan, and Braden is the man assigned to keep her alive.The world building relied on a bit more info dumping than I like. A few instances of POV from a lion Breed named Rothgar Bewcastle Jonas Wyatt provide long bursts of backstory on how the Breeds were forged of animal and human DNA in labs and treated inhumanely, long-winded descriptions of the Mating Heat, and so on. After each of these, I expected to see stardust, a rainbow and "The More You Know" emblazoned across my reader.The first half of the book sets up the action plot. It's not quite suspense, as we know who the bad guy is. We know it's her father's friend, Senator Mac Cooley, and that he's got her surrounded. We're just waiting for Megan to learn how to control her empath abilities and figure out that Cooley's the bad guy.All of a sudden, it's time for the sex plot. Have you seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail? You know that part of the climactic battle scene when it suddenly changes to the colorful screen that says INTERMISSION? The sex is like that. I kept humming that organ loop to myself while reading it.The action just stops, and Tab A, Slot B sex commences for the bulk of the rest of the book. And, speaking of tabs:Horror swept across his face as she felt the change. The swelling of the already thick crest, the extension reaching out, locking onto the back of the pulsing muscles that gripped him, feathering inside her, pressing firmly into a spot that sent sensation crashing through her mind.Penile barb, ladies and gentlemen, penile barb.Another common claim of mine, that I don't read for prose, might also be false. This took me days to read because the mechanical sex prose, coupled with some very purple metaphors, kept yanking me out of the book. One egregious example: His hand landed on her ass once again as she felt the fiery head of his cock breach the virgin portalThis lead me to create a new game for roadtrips: "Sex metaphor, or World of Warcraft quest?" Certainly "breach the virgin portal" sounds like something I did in the Caverns of Time. Then, as quckly as the Sex Phase began, it ended, and the action plot is wrapped up in a 10-15 page fury of action, leaving just enough dangling to seed a sequel. Um, WTF? WTB smooth transitions, PST.I'm sad to say that I did not enjoy the book. I did enjoy the action sequences immensely in a Michael Bay things go A-SPLODE sort of way, but they weren't woven together well enough with the sexxoring to hold my interest. I have the next few books in the series, as I grabbed them all when they were free, so I may try the next one. As it stands, however, I did not like how she wrote the sex scenes, and they took up much of the book.Note to Author: Vaginal lubrication is not opaque and white. Repeatedy calling it "cream" turned my stomach. Opaque and white means the girl's got an infection. Those do not make for sexy cunnilingus. Jus' sayin' is all.