Even though I have awarded five stars to this book, this is actually not the way I feel about it. The only reason I ended up giving it five stars instead of the two I gave it initially, is because together with it's sequal, this is one of the most amazing stories about love, lust, pain, desire, compassion and tenderness I've read so far. Which is why I would advise anyone interested to read the story as if this book and it's sequal were actually published as one book, the way it was supposed to, in my opinon at least.

Here is the reason why I felt this book as a stand alone deserved only two stars.
There was a great sense of wrongness to this book. It was already showing signs in the first chapters, but it really became apparent during the first weekend described. Whereas the previous books in this series were, in my opinion, mostly focused on love and sex (though not necessarily in that exact order), that was not the case in this book. Sure, there was plenty of sex and at least desire, if maybe not love, but it was all overshadowed by an overflowing sense of wrongness about it.

Even though there were plenty of sex scenes and countless orgasms described in the same compelling way as the first two books in the series, none of that really did anything for me. Not because of the BDSM, I have no problem with that. Not even because she is unwilling, or at least apprehensive, of the things that are happening to her. Her reluctance probably adds to the feeling, but it is mostly caused by the fact that not the both of them are too fragile, too broken, too hurt to be in a relationship in any healthy way. Both of them are putting tpo much energy in building up walls around themselves. Not to keep everyone else out, but to keep their own darkness inside, where no one can see, no one can judge, no one can harm, and barely managing at that.

I couldn't help but keep reading, mesmerised in the same way that you can't pull your eyes from a car crash happening in front of you, barely blinking when the shrapnel flies past, as he kept pushing and pushing those walls until there where no two stones on top of one another and all that darkness flowed out in one of the most beautifully terrifying moments I've read so far.

But the thing I cannot forgive, the reason why I at first only awarded two stars to this book, is because the author chose to end the book there. Which turned this into a book about how the love of one man completely destroyed a women who had, untill then, barely managed to keep herself together in a world that was nothing but terrible to her, leaving the reader unfulfilled, brokenhearted and with a bleeding heart for the terrible hurt of this woman's life.

It is a great and terrible skill to be able to wrtie so well that you can truly touch someones heart through your writing, and I hope the writer had powerfull reasons for breaking the story here instead of publishing as one book, even if that reason was a tantrum of a publisher or editor that needed a new book from her, because if she chose to break the story for the sole purpose of selling the sequel, that would surely break my heart.