I feel a slightly cheated after a bit of false advertising. Words like passionate eternity and a suggestive cover meant I thought the book would be at least PG16, not the PG13, clean romance we got. Even the storyline had a good bit of abstinence before marriage woven into it.

Now, if you place that to the side and hope that the book would be marketed as a clean romance, the story is engaging enough and the rating is not impacted by the lack of on page passion. The premise is somewhat unusual with a long time male virgin vampire (Giovanni/Johnny) meeting a sweet, slightly down on her luck but very much in danger waitress (Cassie). Giovanni saves Cassie from an assault and they start dating. This interim time has all the sugary sweetness of YA romances without the need for a PG rating. We then have a series of conflicts, both from the human world as well as the longer running conflict with Giovanni's sire.

The following were niggles for me. Cassie seems to often question her relationship with Giovanni, who are not always sure about the way forward either. This back and forth became quite tiring in the end. The conflicts were endless as well and the book felt overly long with just another tension conflict thrown in because. Lastly, I did not feel that I got to know the characters well at all, they felt somewhat flat. Add in a slew of characters from previous books that had a lot of space and action with the tension points and both Giovanni and Cassie's HEA felt a little as a byproduct in this book.

.

This was my first book by Amanda Ashley and while I did like it, I was not aware that it was several books into a series.

The characters from other books seemed to be a very central focus which made the storyline a little hard to follow. This was my own fault for not doing more research and I didn’t take any stars off for this.

I was drawn to this book because of the idea of a vampire male virgin and was hoping that would lead to some spicy scenes but unfortunately that was not the case. Other characters in the book had more descriptive sex scenes and when it was time for the Giovanni to finally lose his virginity we only got one sentence.

My other complaint was that a lot of the book focused on Cassies insistence that she not want to be turned and while I can understand breaking that promise, I felt like there should have been more focus on the repercussions of that.

I loved the concept of the story but I was definitely hoping for a bit more steam and build up .