In both The Principle of Desire and The Billionaire Submissive, it is the female half of each pair who undergoes the most character change/growth over the course of her story, which in some ways reassures the non-kinky reader who may find a woman with dominant tendencies a bit anxiety-provoking that these heroines are not all-powerful. Beth has to learn to imagine a life separate from Aaron before she can envision a relationship with Ed; Lilly has to learn to believe that a man can love both Lilly and Mistress L before she can commit to Donovan. But in Shelley Ann Clark's Have Mercy, the bigger learning curve is granted to the hero, musician/bar owner Tom. Tom's always been the responsible one, picking up the pieces after his alcoholic father, making sure his younger sister did her homework and ate her dinner. Touring's never been an option before, but now, with his father gone and his sister seeming to have turned the corner in battling her own addiction to liquor, Tom can't resist the offer to tour with rising songster Emily "Emme" Hayes, a woman whose "voice damn near melted his spine.... He heard desire in her voice, and he longed to give her whatever she wanted" (Loc 38). But when things fall apart back home, Tom has to decide whether to keep on giving when he's getting nothing in return, or to be "who he wanted to be, not who he was forced to be by circumstance" (Loc 2655). A daring move, to create a submissive hero who also has a mess of personal problems with which to come to terms.

For her part, Emme is the most openly dominant of the three heroines, even though she's the least aware of her own desires. Or, at least, readers are given far more access to Emme's thoughts and desires than we are to Lilly's or Beth's, desires that are directly at odds with conventional femininity. Early in the novella, Emme masturbates while fantasizing about using the band's new bassist for her own sexual pleasure:

What a stupid fantasy. He seemed different from all the other guys she'd known, sure, but she had no doubt that he'd be like them in bed—pulling her hair, trying to impress her with moves like tossing her around on the bed or putting their hands around her neck. Okay with the right person, maybe, but not what she'd ever really wanted for herself. Things that had always left her feeling a little dissatisfied. Lacking. (Loc 237)

Tom's sexual desires don't quite meet the standards of typical masculinity, either: When they play a new song she's written, "about asking the Lord for mercy for the man she was about to hurt, all he could think was, Please let that man be me" (Loc 475); "He wanted her to push him down and take hi over an dover and over again, preferably while she sang in that husky wet velvet voice" (Loc 457). He seems just the right fit for Emme, who "wanted him to want her, she wanted to make him hurt and yearn, and then she wanted to reward him for it, relieve him of it, make it all better" (Loc 1060).

Tom and Emme gradually discover each other's proclivities, choosing to have an affair despite the promise Emme's bandmates forced her to make before agreeing to hire Tom: she will not seduce the new bass player. The reason behind the promise points to the sexism of the double standard the press, and the public, hold about the sex lives of famous men compared to famous women. By surfacing such openly feminist concerns, rather than blunting Emme's dominant tendencies, Clark doesn't assuage reader anxiety about Emme's unconventional femininity, but asks readers to confront it head-on, then to recognize the sexism that may underlie it.

Best line: "It took its own kind of strength to retain that kindness, that openness, in the face of all his accumulated hurts. For all his guilelessness, he was the strongest man she'd ever met" (Loc 1928).