Forbidden Days by C.L. Quinn

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Life has been harsh, but after a horrible childhood, Park was finally content with her life. Her beautiful home sat on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, she had her dream job, and good friends she trusted.

Then she’s abducted, car-jacked by a stunningly sexy man who she realizes is dangerously crazy…he thinks he’s a vampire. Park plays along until she can escape, until she discovers that there are things out there people like her never knew existed.

Life changed instantly in one night…vampires do exist and she herself is something more than she ever knew. He’d been alive over three hundred years with little complications. But when Bas went to do a simple compel to get a ride on a busy street in L.A. late one night, he found the impossible…a human he couldn’t compel. Only, after a taste, he knew…she was something more than human…something different.

A complication and a mystery on a night all he wanted was transportation home and away from an enemy he wasn’t prepared to fight…yet. He wasn’t looking for her, anything like her, and yet he couldn’t think about letting her go. Yes, he wanted to know what she was, and he needed to protect her from his enemy, but even more than that…somewhere deep inside an old battle-weary vampire, his human heart told him that the time may have come to feel love again.Park had always thought she was broken…was never good enough…she’d been taught that often enough as a little girl who lived in the dark. But sometimes things have to fall apart so they can fall together the way they were always meant to be.

Forbidden Days

Best vampire story I have read in a while!

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

The heroine: Park – she is a genetic researcher who has focused on her work for years and is on track to be able to retire by the age of 40. She works a lot and has a beautiful home on a California beach and she loves tending to her garden. Dating and men have not been a huge priority in her life, which has given her the label of frigid to some, even though she has been described as stunning more than once. She doesn’t see it though, she thinks she looks average and she knows she is definitely socially awkward. She never knows what to say to people she doesn’t know well. Especially on a date, so she doesn’t date often and after the last setup by a friend, plans to stop completely. The abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother when she was a child had a devastating effect on her psyche.

The Hero: Sebastian (a.k.a. Bas) – he is a vampire who has spent most of the last century with a woman whom he had a blood bond, but had not been in love with. She was recently murdered by Shanks, also a former blood bond of Sebastian’s, who had been made into a vampire by a ruthless vampire. When someone was a made vampire, and were blood bonded to someone else, they were driven to kill either their maker or their blood bond, and Shanks who was now without morals was tracking Bas and determined to kill him and anyone he was bonded to.

The story: While running from Shanks, Bas came across Park, in her car outside a restaurant. He got in the car and tried to compel Park to drive him out of town, hours away and into Canada. To Sebastian’s surprise, she couldn’t be compelled, so he had to threaten her. Park thought Bas was a crazy man, especially after he bit her and claimed to be a vampire. She couldn’t explain some of the things he did along the way, but still she thought he was lying about being a vampire, that or he thought he was, which made him even nuttier. However, she could tell that he was being truthful in the fact that they were in danger and had to get away.

I liked this story from the start. I love a good vampire story that takes place in the normal world, not some freaky supernatural society where everyone knows about vampires. I love the fact that though Park is not completely human, she never knew that and always thought she was just a normal girl, or even less than normal since she had been abused so badly by her mother that she had low self-esteem. I liked the characters in this book. Bas has once been in love, three hundred years ago and the pain of watching her grow old and die made him determined to never love again.

In just about every vampire story, the lore is different, as in the way they become vampires, whether they die first, if they can eat food or not, whether sunlight, garlic, holy water affects them and so on. In this book, it is pretty standard vampire lore, though they are not dead, it is more like a virus that changes their DNA. They are allergic to ultra-violet light, so they can’t go out in sunlight, but a lot of the standard vampire lore from books, movies and television isn’t true in this book. Such as garlic, holy water and the like, plus they can eat food and need to eat food to keep on enough weight, but they need blood as well. I liked the way it was done in this book, and like humans there are good and bad vampires, though most don’t kill, they compel humans for feeding and make them forget afterwards.

Not only are the two main characters being chased by Sebastian’s old blood bond, Shanks, but it seems that Shanks’ maker is up to no good, creating an army and killing both blood bonds and vampires. Plus the man that Park was out on a blind date with the night she disappeared is looking for her as well, since she was reported missing and he was detained by the police as a suspect in her disappearance. Quite a bit happens in this book and it only made me hungry to read more of this series!

There are also ultra powerful vampires, called the firsts; one of which may be out to get our main characters. They are the first vampires and their blood is stronger than any other vampires which makes they bigger, better and badder than normal vampires, even older ones like Bas and some of his friends. The firsts can procreate with humans that have a specific genetic trait, unlike normal vampires who are barren and can not have children.

I loved how this book was told from multiple points of view and switched perspectives between different people so you were aware of many different things going on during the same time period and there was more than just the love story between the two main characters, we got to meet a lot of the characters that will be featured in later books in this series and got some great background information on them as well the fact that they added to the plot of this book.

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