Taken to Lemora by Elizabeth Stephens

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Raingar
My horns itch and I hate it. I’m a Lemoran clan chief and I hate that I’m being forced to schmooze with the other Quadrant dignitaries.

Looking for a way out, I run into flesh peddlers. Pagh! I hate flesh peddlers and I’m not interested in what they’re selling!

Until I see her…

Half human, Essmira’s soft, and I hate that she’s so easy to break. I hate that her beauty makes my horns and heart both ache. And most of all, I hate that she has no idea that she’s my mate.

Essmira
A female must always smile. She must always aim to please. She must always obey.

A pleasure female, that’s what I’ve spent my whole life training to be. Now that I’ve been purchased by a Lemoran clan chief, I’m more than happy to please him. But his pleasure might be out of my reach.

Because he doesn’t want me to be a pleasure female anymore. He wants me to be…me.

Taken to Lemora

I was expecting it to be better!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💜🩷💙
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗
World building: 🌏🌍🌎
Character development: ☹️😍😋
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Dual Narration

The Hero: Raingar – he is a Lemoran clan chief, the only male, and the youngest clan chief. He is a severely grumpy male and hates just about everything and likes to say so loudly. He was one of the clan chiefs chosen to go to the trade conference in Quadrant one. His horns had been bothering him since he got near the planet and the itching has gotten worse as he walks around the conference. He talks with one of the Niahhorru space pirates who tells him that the flesh peddlers are selling a human female and want to trade for Qintar, which he and his people sell and is one of the most valuable things in the galaxy.

The heroine: Essmira – she was stolen as a child and raised by a couple, Igmora and Tito, who have trained her throughout her entire life to be someday sold as a sex slave. She had hoped that Igmora and Tito would want to protect her, since they were like the only parents she has ever known. Igmora calls her merchandise, and they let the buyers touch her in ways she doesn’t like. She is afraid that one of those males will end up as her new master. She has learned a few languages but speaks Lemoran the best and doesn’t understand many of the potential buyers.

The Story: Essmira wants to escape, she tries to get out of a golden window, she knows that Tito, with reptilian skin and a barbed tail, wants nothing more than to catch her running, so Igmora will give her to him and he can spend a lifetime punishing her with his tail like he has in the past. She cuts her hand on the window and is caught by a Lemoran male, the one that Igmora said would buy her. Essmira would much rather be bought by the Lemoran male than some of the other species that Igmora has trained her for, species that made her stomach lurch.

Igmora comes into the room accusing Raingar of all kinds of things, using the situation to her advantage to get the maximum price from the Lemoran which was Igmora’s plan all along. After a bidding war between Raingar and another alien, the other Lemoran clan leaders end up purchasing Essmira. It isn’t long before Raingar figures out that Essmira is his mate, which was why his horns were bothering him. I loved the fact that the female clan leaders were the ones that paid for Essmira, because they foresaw issues with Raingar purchasing and technically owning his own mate.

Essmira was a bit too meek for my liking, though she was raised to be a slave, I wanted her to have a bit more spunk and not be so accommodating, especially after finding she was now free. I also wasn’t too fond of the way she snorted when she laughed. Essmira’s meekness was a bit frustrating, especially given her newfound freedom—though it did give her the potential for her to grow into a more assertive character, which she did.

Raingar on the other hand was hilarious. He was so grumpy and surly that you could not help but laugh when he was disturbed to find out that now he liked Essmira, he couldn’t say he hated everything anymore. And there was one scene when she walked into the room, and everything stopped for him. He shouts out “Am I deaf?” genuinely thinking he went lost all hearing. He also gets all worried that his pants don’t look good on him and freaks out when Essmira is looking at him. Raingar’s grumpiness and his unexpected vulnerability seem like they brought some much-needed humor and charm to the narrative.

This book was not nearly as good as the last one. I was pretty bored for quite a while there. Essmira was working as a tailor, and there was a really long scene of her measuring and fitting him for new pants. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t quite the adventure I was hoping for. The story also used Lemoran words for yes (yeffa), no (nob) and a few other things and it was really annoying to me. There was also this weird thing that happened the first time they were intimate, he hurt her somehow, but it was unclear how and he spent a long time after that feeling guilty.

The audiobook is told in dual points of view in dual narration. Joy Beharie and Curtis Michael Holland narrated it. Neither of these narrators is on my list of favorites, but they both have good voices and do a fine job.

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