Bane’s Heart by Sandra R. Neeley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bane is solid, dependable, jaded, and painfully lonely. He is also a bear shifter, hot, sexy, dominant and panty-dropping gorgeous. He’s spent his entire life protecting his older brother from the cruelty of others, including their own parents. He’s never thought he was worthy of anything, much less a Mate. Then he sees her working in the only grocery in their small backwoods town, and he’s stunned. She calms him, gives him joy, makes him hope. His heart comes alive. But she’s young, and she’s quiet; he fears she’ll run from his obvious dominance. He decides to move slowly, earning her trust one day at a time. Then, just as he thinks things are falling into place, she crushes his soul, and disappears. 

Janie has spent her entire life protecting herself and her mother from the terror that is her father. She’s always been made to believe that she was less than. She has accepted that her life will be spent alone, plain ole’ Janie, working her young life away in the local grocery. Then one day a beautiful, sexy, confident man comes into her store. She knows she’ll never be able to do more than admire him from a distance, until he smiles at her and makes her feel like the sun. But her father notices her interest in Bane, and demands that she cut him out of her life. He has other plans, and they don’t include a man in Janie’s life. He needs her submissive, and untouched. 

Ricky is a small town hood and drug dealer. He’s surrounded himself with what he thinks is a powerful and imposing gang. But they made one mistake; the woman they agreed to take as settlement on a debt is Mate to a shifter. Never take a shifters Mate and expect to live! When Janie is traded to the drug dealer as payment for her father’s debt, it brings the wrath of an entire clan of shifters down upon the heads of Ricky and his gang. Will Bane be able to save his Janie? Will Janie be able to accept Bane’s true nature? Can they forgive each other and find the happiness that every shifter prays for?

Bane’s Heart

Not the bane of her existence!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🖤❤️💜🩵
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: 😭☺️😊😋🥰

The Hero: Bane – he is a bear shifter, half black bear and half grizzly. He has an older brother named Bam who is a gentle soul. Their parents were addicts that only kept them because their welfare checks were bigger after they had them, though they spent most of the money on their drugs. They abused and ridiculed Bam horrendously about being stupid and soft. Though Bane was the younger of the two, he took on the role of protector and tried to take the brunt of their parents’ ire onto himself. Now that they are older, they are part of a clan of mismatched shifters in the Louisiana bayou.

The heroine: Janie – her father is a mean and abusive drunk. He has beaten her mother her entire life to the point where her mother, Sadie is extremely submissive and does everything she can to placate him. Now that Janie is older, she has been stepping in between her parents when her dad has been drinking to take the focus off her mom. She won’t move away unless she can get her mom to come with her. Janie works at the local grocery store, and her dad takes all her money for drink and drugs.

The story: Bane has known for a while that he is attracted to Janie even though she is younger than him and very shy. He makes trips to the grocery store every few days, never buying more than a few days worth of groceries at a time, so he can see her more often. He finally asks her out and she refuses to go out to dinner or a movie, saying she has to get home, so he takes her to lunch during her break at work. It isn’t long before he knows for certain that she is his one true mate. Though when her Dad finds out, he forces Janie to break up with him, since he plans to use her to pay off his debt to his drug dealer.

I just love each of the shifters in this pack, but especially Bam and Bane. Bam is such a gentle giant, and is in some ways like a child, but in others he is so smart. He knows how to fix almost any kind of appliance or electronics, he knows things that he shouldn’t know and he is just so nice, that you can’t help but love him. Then there is Bane who gets emotional when Avaleigh from the first book is so sweet to Bam. She shows him he is loved by always serving him meals first and always packing him leftovers for lunch, because she knows his own parents never showed him any love. Bane is always near his brother and assures him that even after he finds his one, he is never going to go far, even building a house next to Bam’s and adding a room for Bam if he wants to spend the night.

I thought the first book in this series was terrific, but this one was even better. Goldy, the older lion shifter in the clan even finds his one true mate in this book, which tied in with story so perfectly. There was also a very short storyline about a big cat shifter named Riley and I see there is another series by Sandra Neeley called Riley’s Pride, that I will probably look into reading. I have so far really enjoyed everything I have read of hers; the stories are so good and the world building of these paranormal clans in the real world is awesome.

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