Finished Lover Eternal by J.R. Ward. It’s the second book in her popular Black Dagger Brotherhood series.

This one is about Rhage, a vampire cursed to carry a dragon-like beast inside his body for 200 hundred years. The dragon-beast comes out whenever Rhage’s emotions get out of control, so he uses anonymous sex and violence against lessers (the bad guys) as outlets to keep himself under control. But all that changes when Rhage meets Mary, a human woman who’s dying from leukemia. One look at her, and he’s in lurv, as my significant other says.

I enjoyed Dark Lover, the first book in the series, and I was looking forward to another great read. But Lover Eternal really disappointed me. The main reason? I just didn’t like Rhage. I thought he was arrogant and cocky and bordered on being a psycho stalker, the relentless way he kept pursuing Mary.

For example, Rhage calls Bella and basically tells her to set her friend Mary up with him. That he’s coming to get Mary one way or another, and Bella can either make it a nice date … or not. Yuck. Plus, there was an implied fact that this behavior was okay, that the BDB vampires can do whatever the hell they want to women as long as they kill lessers. This moral code did not sit well with me. I wanted to take that whip thing the brothers use on Rhage and give him some lashes with it myself.

I liked Mary okay, but I thought she deserved someone a lot better than Rhage. Someone who didn’t try to control and bulldoze her into falling for him at every turn.

Plus, I found myself much more interested in the other characters than I did in the romance between Rhage and Mary. For example, I loved the scenes between Bella and Zsadist, and John’s story was pretty interesting too. As for the bad guys, I didn’t get the sense they were up to anything in this book – they didn’t really seem to have a nefarious plan to kill all the vampires. The bad guys and their actions seemed like more of a stop-gap to set up Book 3 (Bella and Zsadist).

I’m going split decision on this one. Thumbs down to the Rhage-Mary romance; thumbs up for the world building, advancement of the series, and other characters (especially Bella and Zsadist).

Up next: Not sure yet. Something from my ever-growing to-be-read pile.

Now, I’m bracing myself for the onslaught of comments from people who absolutely loved this book …