Dark Desire [Mass Market Paperback]

I read Dark Desire right after the first book in the Carpathian Series, Dark Prince, and it is quite different from the first book. At first, I didn't really like the characters, but they really grew on me. Jacques is a tortured dark hero who cannot remember anything of his past and is completely reliant on Shea. Shea was a very strong female who was determined to go it alone and prove that she didn't need help from anyone. It was also wonderful to see some of the characters from Dark Prince pop up here, but you do not have to read the first one to understand what is going on in this one. I thought that Christine Feehan did a great job with this story and the time just flew by as I sat down and devoured it in one sitting. If you have not yet experienced the pleasures of Feehan's Dark/Carpathian series, treat yourself - every book is a keeper!

Jacques has been a powerful protector of his people, the Carpathians of Eastern Europe, for hundreds of years. He uses his enormous supernatural mental and physical powers to hunt and destroy vampires and to protect the weak. However, his abilities to see colors and to feel emotions have withered. He's trapped in a bleak, solitary existence, for he has not found his lifemate-the one female who is the other half of his soul, the light to his darkness. His predatory instincts have intensified, and his darkness threatens to overwhelm him so that he is close to turning into a vampire. He must find his mate soon.

To make matters worse, evil human vampire hunters are convinced he is a vampire. With the help of a mysterious vampire who hates Jacques, the humans catch and torture Jacques mercilessly, driving a stake near his heart and burying him alive. Jacques manages to live on for seven years, attracting small animals into his coffin and drinking their blood for sustenance. His hatred of his torturers and his need for revenge are a growing cancer in his soul that keeps him alive.

During this time Jacques is mentally aware of a human woman, a doctor whom he thinks is linked to the group that tortured him. In his extreme state of weakness, she is the only person left that he can contact through his mind. He often inflicts his pain on her, enraged that she refuses to come free him-seeing this as evidence of her guilt.

Shea O'Halloran is a gifted American surgeon, full of goodness and compassion for her patients. She is puzzled as to why she is sometimes seized with pain and often has dreams in which she sees a man's tortured face. She has always been a loner, afraid of contact with others because of the bizarre blood disorder she has been unable to identify or cure. She often requires transfusions to stay alive. She decides to go the Carpathian mountains, the birthplace of the father she never knew, in order to further her research in the hope of finding a cure for her condition.

Instead, she is drawn to a hidden cellar where she finds Jacques buried! Although he attacks her, she rescues him and nurses him back to health. Jacques comes to realize that she is not one of his tormentors but the lifemate he'd been searching for over centuries. He possessively burns for her and can barely prevent himself from claiming her, body and soul, against her will.

Shea is horrified to feel such a strong pull to Jacques. And not only because he's lost all memory of his life prior to his burial and is violent and unpredictable. Mostly she fears ever to love or to need anyone. For the intensity with which her own mother obsessed over Shea's absent father led her to be a terrible mother and finally to commit suicide.

Shea and Jacques are forced to deal not only with the tremendous electric sensuality and fear between them but also with others appearing in their lives who may or may not be vampires. And the danger that Jacques-who is now more beast than man-will kill them or Shea is ever present. As Jacques begins to remember his past and to heal both physically and emotionally, his skills are taxed to the limit, as are Shea's.

Dark Desire is a wild, scary and immensely sensual ride that grows ever more intense as danger mounts and Shea and Jacques grow to fervently love each other. I didn't mind that the mysterious villain is easy to guess because the action and emotion are so intense that every page is a thoroughly entertaining adventure.