Kaid’s Queen by Sandra R. Neeley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kaid has watched as members of his clan have found and claimed their One, their Mate. Even the female that he had once hoped to claim as his own has found and claimed her One. He’s lonely, he’s tired of waiting, and his Bear is growing bitter and despondent watching from the side, never gifted with his own. He’s tired of hurting. Then a visit from an old friend delivers his heart’s desire. He’s speechless. She is beyond all he ever dreamed. But there’s a problem; she’s more Alpha than he is, housing a Monster that even she is afraid to release. And the little fact that he failed her before he ever knew she existed; how can she forgive him for his failure if he cannot even consider forgiving himself? 

Delilah was born in captivity. Her parents murdered. All she has ever known is rules, permissions, cruelty, forced to barter in trade each day for her very survival. The concept of love, family and happiness mean nothing to her; they are merely words. Her captor leaves one day, never to return. She believes she’s been left to die a slow, painful death, starving in the cell that is her home. Then a chance encounter saves her; a human searching for answers stumbles across her hidden prison. She doesn’t trust him, but she’s got nothing to lose and he’s got food! So she goes with the man on an adventure that takes her to an Alpha who could be all she never knew she needed. Now if only the Monster that resides inside her wouldn’t eat her newfound friends, this might not be too bad! 

While Kaid and Delilah struggle to form a bond other than the obvious physical one, a vengeful, unseen threat from the past scurries into the periphery of their lives, threatening not only their new-found chance at happiness, but the lives of every member of their clan and the very land they call home. Will this threat be detected in time to save the lives of all Avaleigh’s Boys and everyone they hold dear?

Kaid’s Queen

Ice, Ice, Baby!

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

The Hero: Kincaid (a.k.a. Kaid) – he is a grizzly bear shifter, the alpha of a clan of mismatched shifters in the Louisiana bayou. Kaid was one of the main characters of the first book in this series I’m Not a Dragon’s Mate in which he was kidnapped by a half serpent/half dragon shifter named Lurin, who had known of some kind of prophecy that involved Kaid and his mate as well as Avaleigh and her mate Daniel. Lurin tried to keep the mates apart so that the prophecy telling of his own death didn’t come to pass. Kaid had to claim Avaleigh for them to escape Lurin’s clutches and he wanted to complete the bond with her, though she ended up finding her fated one in Daniel. Kaid was happy for them but feared he would never find his one one true mate; he was lonely, and his bear had been on the edge lately.

The heroine: Delilah – she is Kaid’s mate and was held in Lurin’s basement cell since she was young. She often was forced to trade favors for food and water. Often her food was bad, her water was drugged to make her sleep and bad things happened when she was asleep. When they were angry with her, they would give her water and food from an automatic feeder like an animal, though the food was dry cereal. After Lurin was killed, she ran out of food and went days without before Amos found her and brought her to Kaid and his clan.

The story: when Amos shows up in Louisiana with Lilah, Kaid immediately knows she is his mate. Though she is confused at how the world works since she grew up in captivity. There is so much she doesn’t know since she never learned, she never had a mother or a family. She is a shifter, though nobody knows what kind at first. She thinks her beast is a monster, it rarely speaks to her in words, just emotional outbursts in growls and hisses. She sometimes struggles to control the beast and other times when she wants to shift, it sits back and refuses to come out.

I have really liked this series so far. I love the fact that the clan is a mishmash of different shifter types, and that they, including the mates they have found so far have made a real family unit. I love that they all live in the woods near a small town in the Louisiana bayou and that they have a main big house which is surrounded by individual houses. They all eat dinner (and often breakfast and lunch) in the big house together. All the guys work for their construction company and many of them have side hustles too. The world building and character development is on point, and I am invested in and love all of these characters. Reminds me a bit of Suzanne Wright’s shifter series (Phoenix Pack, Mercury Pack and Olympus Pride). The stories are all terrific as well.

This one brought back Slatterly, the evil beaver. He was Lurin’s servant, and he thinks he deserves payback for all he did for Lurin. He wanted to keep Delilah as his own and was not happy to find that she somehow got away from Lurin’s dungeon. He had wanted her to submit to him and when she wouldn’t, he left her alone there for days without food. It was awesome when he returned hoping to see a more malleable female and found her gone instead. Though he knew soon after that he was with Kaid, and his clan, so was determined to get back what he thought belonged to him. The story was good, and even though you wouldn’t think the beaver would be any trouble for a clan with a dragon, a bunch of bears, a wolf and a big cat shifter, he was kind of diabolical and proved to be more dangerous than I expected.

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