Review: "Make You Mine" by Jackie Ashenden (Nine Circles #2)
Note: This ARC was provided by St. Martin's Press in exchange for an honest review.
Alex St. James may appear to be like a spoiled playboy but there are reasons why he is the way he is and they're reasons he has no plans of sharing with anyone. He has his secrets, one of which has made him the man he is today, and he prefers to not look back on his past, even though the nightmares still haunt him. When his best friend hands over a pair of dice that serves as an invitation to a poker game hosted by the man who did the unthinkable when he was sixteen, Alex knows that he can keep pretending what happened doesn't matter to him or he can finally confront the monster and the traumatic past he's hidden from.
Katya Ivanova has been on the job several months already and she doesn't really have any complaints about the man she's tasked to protect. When news about the man she was promised to for marriage reaches her, she asks Alex St. James to be let out of her contract. He refuses and comes up with an alternative: she'll stay on and pretend to be his lover while in Monte Carlo for the poker game and he'll help her find the man she's looking for afterwards. What Katya doesn't realize, however, is just how dangerous a game Alex is actually playing and that it may very well cost him his life and her her heart.
Make You Mine is the second book in the Nine Circles series by Jackie Ashenden and picks up days after the epilogue in the first book, Mine to Take. I suggest that the books be read in order because even though the love stories themselves work as standalones, the other aspects of the story, i.e. Nine Circles and the Seven Devils, are interrelated. I'm glad Alex St. James and Katya Ivanova finally get together in this sequel. They may not have had a lot of sexual tension in the previous novel but she was the one constant in his life, even if it had just been for a few months, and their getting together was definitely a fun read.
Fans of the series will get more of Alex's back story and learning about what happened to him when he was sixteen and how it affected the rest of his life makes it so much easier to understand his actions, especially when it came to his mother and sister Honor. With Katya being a very minor character in the first book, knowing about her and her past shows that she's much more than Alex's stoic and loyal bodyguard. Alex may have trusted Katya with his life but he was hesitant to share with her his secrets, believing it would make her look at him differently, but I liked how Katya was as strong emotionally as she is physically.
I loved how Alex and Katya were able to find the strength in one another even at their most vulnerable and the evolution of their relationship seemed almost natural. Having no one else but one another to rely on while in Monte Carlo, they began to see each other for the real people they were underneath all the effed-up layers. The suspense thriller aspect was still at a high and while there are still a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to the Seven Devils in general, this book does what the first one did as well: it whets your appetite just enough to make you crave for even more. Make You Mine gets 4.5 stars! ♥
Release Date: 05 May 2015
Date Read: 03 May 2015
Learn more about Jackie Ashenden here.
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