Tamed: An Arcadia Novel

Arcadia #1

by Jackie Ashenden

A billionaire, age-gap romance....
Caleb

I'm a man without limits, except my best friend's daughter, Isabel. She's a tempting little brat, but she's definitely off limits. She's too young and far too innocent, and I'm not the right kind of man for that. My tastes run toward the dark side. When she shows up at my sex club spoiling for a fight, I'm tempted to give her one ... and a punishment she won't soon forget. I'm sure that I can scare her away, but when I tell her to call me daddy, she doesn't run. She obeys.

Isabel

I've had a crush on my dad's best friend for years, but who knew he wasn't just hot? He's also kinky, and he makes me want to do very bad things. He makes me call him daddy, and I want him to take of me, and corrupt me in a hundred different ways. But when I start to want more than sex, Caleb is he'll take care of me, give me boundaries, make me his little girl, but he'll never fall in love.

Unless I can change him.

this book contains explicit scenes and language

290 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 16, 2023

About the author

Jackie has been writing fiction since she was eleven years old. Mild mannered fantasy/SF/pseudo-literary writer by day, obsessive romance writer by night, she used to balance her writing with the more serious job of librarianship until a chance meeting with another romance writer prompted her to throw off the shackles of her day job and devote herself to the true love of her heart – writing romance. She particularly likes to write dark, emotional stories with alpha heroes who've just got the world to their liking only to have it blown wide apart by their kick-ass heroines.

She lives in Auckland, New Zealand with her husband, the inimitable Dr Jax, two kids, two cats and some guppies (possibly dead guppies by the time you read this). When she's not torturing alpha males and their stroppy heroines, she can be found drinking chocolate martinis, reading anything she can lay her hands on, posting random crap on her blog, or being forced to go mountain biking with her husband.

Reviews

[Donna Repsher · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful way start off a steamy, new series! Tamed is the first novel in Jackie Ashenden's Arcadia series, Arcadia is the name of an uber-exclusive sex club, but true to her style, Ms. Ashenden makes us wait, and doesn't immediately fill it with a dungeon and scenes of Doms and submissives and their BDSM sexcapades. Instead, her focus is on her two main characters, Isabel, age 23, and Caleb, age 42, and what a story she has to tell. This is most definitely a 5-star read.

Isabel's mother died giving birth to her, and because her mother was the daughter of one of the most powerful families in the nation, Juliana, who snuck off to fall in love with and marry an 18-year-old street thug, her father's grief over the loss of Juliana, made him keep his baby girl at arms length, hiding her and keeping her away from any contact with or information about her mother, and her mother's family, the family that would have taken her away from him. Instead she was home-schooled, and her most frequent babysitter was often Caleb, her dad's best and most trusted friend, a slighly older fellow street tough who had a horrendous childhood, but just like Isabel's father, rose above his beginnings and became wealthy and powerful in his own right.

Now Isabel is working in a ground-floor level job at Caleb's company, being trained to take over her fathers' mega-corp when he retires. But Isabel is no longer a child, and at 23 has never been on a date, let alone been kissed, and she's sick and tired of the 3 bodyguards who are her constant retinue whenever she sets foot outdoors. She finds a girlfriend at work, Zara, and they devise a plan to lose Isabel's bodyguards and visit Arcadia, on the one night a month when they host a virgin auction. Zara, who is broke, plans to be the virgin they auction off, and when the two young women are separated, who should spot Isabel but Caleb, and she's just as shocked to see him, her father and their mutal friend, Atlas at the club. It's when Caleb pulls her aside, before his friends notice her presence, that Ms. Ashenden really turns up the heat.

What follows is an addictive combination of an angst-filled, age-gap, dangerous, steamy romantic suspense novel, and a friend/protector-to-lover tale that tests every relationship Isabel and Caleb have, and I was immediately hooked from the very first scene. I think you will be too--it was an excellent read.

[Traci Westling · Rating 5 out of 5]

SUPER ANGSTY HOT!

Wow!! What wonderfully tragic flawed characters within this book! Talk about ANGST, it’s a top notch angsty one that left me about drained . So many emotions at play & couldn’t help but get a bit misty eyed . HIGHLY recommend this beautiful story with Isabel & Caleb! Will be tough waiting on the next one in series!

[Claudia, Cmarie927 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read

Ooh! This one is a great start to a new series from one of my favorite authors. It is dark, dangerous, deviant, and delightful. 😉

Isabel and Caleb have many reasons why they shouldn't be together. But as we all know, those are also the reasons why this couple ignores them.

Age gap? Yup.
Her Dad's best friend? Of course.
Daddy/little kink? Sure.
Damaged hearts- both thinking they are unwanted and unworthy of love? Absolutely.

I appreciated Isabel's strength and determination to find her happiness, while dragging Caleb into his.
This author consistently provides engaging and entertaining reads like this one, and the push-pull of these characters' desires for each other is very compelling. I sincerely enjoyed this read and can't wait for the next one.

[Stephanie Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here’s the thing…I can hang with an age gap billionaire dad’s best friend/business partner thing. But the backstory dialed up the creep factor to 11 for me. The MMC essentially raised the FMC for a good amount of her childhood. Yikes. We all know what we’re here for. And it’s not the backstory. If there is going to be a backstory, please God don’t dial up the creep factor even further. I think this book would have been easier to read if I had never heard of Peppry Spepstein and friends. I found myself skimming through the bits between spicy scenes. The spicy scenes themselves were solid. I just had to pretend I hadn’t read any of the details of the characters’ histories.