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Review / Release Blitz: Coerced Queen (New York Underworld #3) by Charmaine Pauls


Title: Coerced Queen
Series: New York Underworld #3
Author: Charmaine Pauls
Genre: Dark Mafia Romance
Tropes: Enemies to Lovers/Touch Her and Die
Fake Relationship/Forced Proximity
Release Date: December 16, 2024

BLURB

My husband will never love me, but I’m in this now until death do us part.

The man who threatened to carry me over his shoulder down the aisle and marry me at knifepoint is both my captor and my liberator. He makes me weak and strong at the same time.
Before, he didn’t give me an option. Now, there’s a choice. But he’s determined to push me away.
If I’m wise, I’ll take that freedom and run for my life. Because the heart of the man who captured and saved me will always belong to the woman who broke it. The man who calls himself my husband will never be mine.
Only, there is no choice for me any longer. It’s way too late to walk away.

I’m in this war now … until death do us part.

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EXCERPT
He turns, facing me squarely. “Everything I do and everything I’ve done are for selfish reasons. If I’m watching out for you or taking care of you, it’s because I like the way you make me feel. You have an effect on me no other woman has. You make my c&ck hard every f#cking time I look at you, even when I’ve just come the hardest in my life and it should be physically impossible. So when I tell you that I’m doing it for me, I’m not lying.”

His words hurt, slicing right through me like he almost did with the blade of his knife. Yet that’s not the truth I see when I look at his actions. That’s not the hope I hold on to when I close my eyes at night and shed lonely tears with him right beside me in bed.

Swallowing back those tears that burn at the back of my eyes, I lift my chin. “You’re wrong, Sav. A man who does everything with his own self-interest in mind won’t give his life to save me and my baby.”

The statement pierces him like a sword. I see it in the way he winces as he’s forced to face the simplest of truths when all his arguments are exhausted and only his considerate behavior is left to speak for itself.

We face each other like pieces on a chess table. It’s a checkmate move. It’s playing dirty. I admit that. Pushing him into a corner to confess something I desperately need to hear isn’t honorable. But I don’t know how else to open his eyes to something he won’t allow himself to believe. Maybe he thinks it will be a betrayal of his love for Rachele. But people can love more than one person. They can get hurt and trampled and find happiness again. He lost his first love, but he’s my first love. If he gives us a chance, we can be so much more than lust and s€x.

He turns away with that wounded look on his face, running away from the future we could’ve had. And I’m still thoroughly and utterly ruined, a silly, opportunistic woman who put her heart on the line in a gamble she lost.

MY REVIEW


Anya and Saverio's end just may be coming, in one way or another. Whether it's because of the Mafia war they're involved in, or because of Sav's insistence that he doesn't love Anya and she finally has enough - they might be done. But are they really? They have a baby now, and Anya has ingrained herself into his life and his business (and his heart?). They have a chance to be something real. If both circumstances and Sav himself, allow it.


Anya and Sav's journey has been a long, intense one. There were many times I wasn't sure they'd make it out together, or even alive, actually, but they did and I went through every emotion with them as they experienced them. Charmaine's heroes, or anti-heroes I should say, always live in the grey area, and boy is Sav in that grey. But Anya, she's his foil, his counterpart, even if she had to embrace her darkness too. She stood out in every way, especially in the last installment of their story when she truly came into her own as a character, as a mother, and as a wife. Sav took his sweet time coming to important realizations, and honestly I wanted to smack him many, many times, before he finally got his head on straight. But in the very end, they FINALLY got their sweet, so very satisfying happy ever after I'd been hoping (and doubting at times) they would get.


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AUTHOR BIO


Charmaine loves to write dark and edgy romance that will melt both your e-reader and your heart. She's a mom of two teenagers, an adorable dog, and a dominant cat. Her country of birth is South Africa where many of her stories play off. Her French husband kidnapped her to the south of France where she currently lives with her family. When she's not writing, you'll find her in the kitchen baking cakes or in the gym lifting weights (because ... all those cakes!).

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