Brutal Desire

by M. James

I’ve already made a deal with one mafia boss. I have no intention of falling prey to another.

The mafia boss I owed my loyalty to is dead–killed by a rival family. With him gone, I’m forced to pick up the pieces of my life, and make sure my little brother is cared for. But my job as a ballerina and moonlighting at a Los Angeles club aren’t enough, and soon I’m forced to consider other options.

Lorenzo Campano seems like one of those options. But he’s not willing to make the same deal that I had before. He says he’s not interested in having me in his bed–but the way he looks at me says otherwise.

Instead, the work he gives me drags me further into the criminal world of the mafia. And as that work draws us closer together, the lines between business and pleasure blur more and more.I thought I knew what this life entailed. But I only scratched the surface before–and I no longer know if I want out.

This life is a brutal one. But there’s one lesson I have yet to learn.

In the end, desire always wins.

Brutal Desire is a steamy full-length standalone that can be enjoyed in one sitting!

Genres: Dark Romance

334 pages, Paperback

Published March 21, 2024

About the author

Prepare to be captivated by the sensational world of M. James, the mastermind behind a genre-defying realm of romance and intrigue. With a pen dipped in passion and a heart that beats to the rhythm of forbidden desires, M. James weaves tantalizing tales that will leave you breathless and yearning for more.

Follow her to the dark side where strong heroines fearlessly navigate treacherous paths and damaged heroes find solace in their darkest corners. Her words will wrap around your senses like a seductive embrace, transporting you to a world where love and danger dance a wicked tango.

M. James resides in the suburbs of Chicago but lives for the big moments that make life interesting. Although writing brings her passion and darkest fantasies alive, watching suspenseful thrillers with her two dogs and loving husband brings her excitement in the most exhilarating way. Nonetheless, getting lost in a dark mafia romance along with a tall glass of wine makes any day a bit juicier.

From enemies to lovers to forbidden romances, M. James' stories of passion, intrigue, and betrayal will keep you hooked until the very end. If your appetite craves the intoxicating prose of Rina Kent or the allure of Sophie Lark, prepare to be entangled in M. James' captivating new series. But be warned, dear reader, for her world is not for the faint of heart. It is a world where inhibitions are shed, and inhibitions are tested. It is a world where passion reigns supreme, and where the pursuit of love can ignite a blaze that consumes all in its path.

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Reviews

[CJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is kind of a frustrating read. On the one hand, M. James is great at creating, building, and maintaining tension between characters, so it's easy to pick this book up and not want to put it down. On the other hand, the conflict between the characters is so contrived in this book that I kept wanting to shout at them, particularly at Lorenzo, for needlessly complicating what could have been a very simple arrangement.

Brief synopsis: Mila is a professional ballet dancer (we'll come back to this) and the sole caretaker of her much younger brother, who has trauma-induced mutism after surviving the car accident that killed their mother. To help make ends meet, Mila also works at a low-end strip club, but since that's still not enough, she has an arrangement with a guy who happens to be in the mafia. Except that guy dies, leaving her scrambling and desperate for a way to pay for her brother's therapy and all their other bills.

Enter Lorenzo Campano (brother of Dante, MMC in Carnal Desire). After their initial accidental meeting, Mila offers herself to Lorenzo the same way she did to Alfio, the previous guy, but Lorenzo's very specific moral compass rejects the notion of paying a desperate woman for sex, so instead he pays her to run drugs for him at her strip club. He also doesn't believe in mixing business with pleasure, so despite the overwhelming chemistry between them, he repeatedly tells her they can't be together and turns down her repeated offers of sex for money. Except when he can't keep his hands off her.

Okay, so the main problem. Mila works in a strip club where she makes peanuts, partly because her ballet physique doesn't appeal to the clientele of that particular club. Lorenzo's family owns strip clubs, higher end ones where apparently someone with Mila's body type would make more money (we just have to take this as a given since Mila herself is the one who tells us this information). Why doesn't Lorenzo offer her a job at one of his own clubs? The thought never even crosses his mind. Are we really meant to believe that the *only* employment a mafia underboss can think to offer a young, beautiful woman is in drug-running? It's absurd, and that absurdity is never questioned throughout the narrative. The exploitation is, sure - Lorenzo doesn't want to exploit Mila's desperation for sex, but he knows that he's exploiting it anyway by having her sell drugs, and he knows he's put her in an even worse situation than if he just became her sugar daddy. There is some attempt by the narrative to deal with this cognitive dissonance, but I don't really buy it. Hence the frustration. Carnal Desire, James' previous book, has a much more believable conflict in that Dante doesn't want to endanger Emma by pulling her into his world, and she has moral qualms about being involved with a mob boss. Simple, straightforward, realistic. (BTW there are references and slight spoilers for Carnal Desire in this book, but nothing that will diminish your enjoyment of either if you only read one or if you read them out of order).

Overall, this is only a fun read if you can turn your brain off long enough to enjoy it.

Now for the ballet commentary. You can stop reading here if you don't care about this. As a former dancer, I like to see how authors approach writing characters who are part of the professional dance world, which is a very niche and kind of insular community with its own history, culture, and vocabulary. In other words, if you want to write about it convincingly, you've got to do a heck of a lot of research. James, unfortunately, did not do this.

There are the seemingly petty critiques about jargon: rehearsal, not recital; class or rehearsal, not practice; pointe shoes are tied, not laced up (ribbons are not laces); concert, performance, production, or just ballet instead of showcase (showcases are a type of performance, but the author uses it wrong here), corps instead of company (corps, short for corps de ballet, is a rank within a company); ballerina's bun (like every single time) instead of simply bun; "instructor" instead of whatever Annalise's title actually is (probably artistic director); and most infuriatingly, "male ballerina." I say seemingly petty because while these are simple, minor mistakes, they are the easiest ones to fix. All you have to do is Google, say, "what is a male dancer called" (a dancer, same as female dancers actually) or "who is in charge of a ballet company" to get the answers. If you're not willing to do even that baseline amount of work, why are you even writing about ballet?

Then there's my medium-level critique, which seems to always be the same in books about dancers: company structure. There are two broad types of ballet companies: ranked and rankless. Larger, more prestigious, and more classically-based companies tend to be ranked companies, which means that every company member is part of a hierarchy, starting at trainee or apprentice at the bottom and with principal dancer at the top (some European companies use the terms prima ballerina and premier danseur for their principal ranks, but those titles can be held by multiple dancers within the company). In a ranked company, principal dancers are usually cast in the leading roles in a ballet, soloists in lesser, but still significant roles, and corps de ballet members in large group roles. Sometimes, particularly in a long-running show, a dancer will jump ranks and get a few performances in a role above their rank, which is usually a sign they are about to be promoted. That's another thing most people who have only ever watched Black Swan don't see to understand - in a large enough company, principal and solo roles are rotated among several different dancers. If you're a principal dancer, you might be performing as one of two or three different main roles on a given night, and there will be some shows where you get the night off. In a rankless company, all dancers have the same title (usually just "dancer" or "company member") and the main roles can go to anyone in the company. This is most common with smaller companies and modern/contemporary companies that don't do a lot of story ballets. We know Mila is in a ranked company because she's trying to get the title of "prima," but I'm not sure James knows what that means. Mila is "the lead" in "the showcase," and there's never any mention of anyone in the company being above her, nor of anyone sharing her role, just an understudy who apparently hates being the lead because the director sucks. If this were a real company, it is likely a very small one, and that's why Mila feels she wouldn't be able to move to a different company without having to start from scratch. But the only companies she can think about moving to are on the East Coast because James doesn't appear to know that one of the oldest and most prestigious companies in the world is in San Francisco. (Fun fact, there is a professional ballet company in LA, but it's not very old and not very well-known. I don't know why this is except that LA is freaking expensive and dominated by Hollywood. It's also a rankless company.)

Then we have some more weighty critiques.

First, Mila's narrative tells us that ballet dancers prostituting themselves to rich patrons is a common occurrence in the ballet world. Now, I'm not going to say this never happens - in fact, there was a significant period of time in ballet history when this *was* pretty normalized - and I know my own experience isn't universal, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is a rare phenomenon in the modern world. While it's true that most ballet companies don't pay a lot, there are a lot more options for supplementing that income than there used to be. Probably the most common ones are the ones are waitressing and teaching, the latter of which is never mentioned in the narrative even though it's also the most obvious.

Second, there are repeated references to Mila's weakness and fragility. I know dancers look like they can be blown over by a stiff breeze, but they have to be incredibly strong physically to do what they do. And while female ballet dancers in particular tend not to build a lot of upper-body strength (less so now than in previous decades as the art form has evolved and more companies do contemporary work), Mila is a pole dancer, which requires *incredible* amounts of strength in both her upper and lower body. Don't believe me? Try it yourself.

In general, the way James writes about ballet is so ignorant at times that it almost comes across as disrespectful. Mila repeatedly gripes about her "instructor" (again, probably artistic director) giving the dancers a hard time for skipping class/rehearsal and being critical of technical errors. The ONLY dancers who have this kind of attitude are the ones who don't make it to the professional level. If you want to dance professionally, you have to show up every day. You have to attend every rehearsal. And you absolutely have to pay attention to the "slightest mistakes" because being a dancer is about honing your body to the highest level of technical and artistic excellence it can achieve. No dancer who whinges about being corrected is going to make it in this field. Yeah, it sounds like Annalise is a crappy director, but James doesn't seem to know *what* makes a crappy director or what creates a toxic culture within a company. If she wanted to know, she could have asked a dancer! Everyone is on Instagram.

I was almost surprised that there's no indication Mila has disordered eating, given the way James describes her physique and the other ways she talks about ballet. There is one reference to Mila "rarely eat[ing] anything as caloric as a burger," and that's it. So that's good. Although even here, I want to clarify that a lot of dancers avoid burgers not because they have lots of calories but because they have lots of *empty* calories. Many dancers (though not all!) eat very clean foods - minimally processed or at least low in saturated fats, refined sugars, and salt. Eating disorders absolutely are an endemic problem in the ballet world, but more and more dancers today are educated about nutrition and make healthy choices about how to fuel their bodies effectively AND sufficiently.

There's a long aside in the book about the pain associated with being a dancer, and James is sort of right there. Being sore is normal. Getting blisters and bruises is normal. Even getting bruised toenails is not uncommon, although I'd argue if you've got a pair of pointe shoes that fits you well, you take care of your feet, and you're dancing correctly, they shouldn't be. But "strained nerves, toes with nails blackened or missing, feet cramped and twisted" should NOT be a dancer's day-to-day experience! (I think the twisted feet thing maybe is referring to bunions? which lots of dancers have, but that's a bit of a dramatic way to talk about them) Getting injured is pretty much an inevitability in any athletic career. But it's a *rare* occurrence for most individual athletes, and painting a dancer's life as a macabre horror show is overly sensationalized and, combined with the other things I've mentioned, makes me think that whatever understanding James has of ballet is at least a half-century out of date.

Why am I griping about errors most readers are never going to notice? Because a) there is a lot of stigma and misinformation about ballet, especially in the US, and I think it would be good if more people understood it, and b) because I think authors have a responsibility to their craft to do their due diligence regarding the subjects they write about. It's 2025. Every dancer on earth has an Instagram profile and I'm sure at least a few dozen of them would be more than happy to do some interviews or even an alpha read for an author who wants to write about their profession. It's frustrating to me that so few authors are willing to put in the work to do this.

Oh, one other petty critique that has nothing to do with dance. ALWAYS add onion to your pan before garlic. Garlic cooks more quickly and can easily burn.

[Maureen Walsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to
Love this book but sadly found my self skimming quite a bit. I didn’t get much from the main characters except the urge to slap them more and more as the book dragged on. I gave it 2 stars sadly.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this one alot. More than the first one. The changes in the characters are so good and I didn't see them coming. It's so so good.

[Charlene Gaskins · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 I loved the first book in this series but was very disappointed in Lorenzo and Mila's story.

Both characters were so messed up. Lorenzo seemed as though he was trying to prove himself to Dante and yet made some very bad decisions throughout the book. Mila's character was very focused on "poor me, ain't it awful" throughout this book as she made one bad decision after another. Her entire persona as the loving sister/and stripper/ballerina was a hard sell for me. She was always looking for someone to bail her out and yet she wasn't even honest with her best friend Darcy. Sleeping with a mobster in order to help pay the bills and then blaming Lorenzo for ending her gravy train when that mobster is killed, wasn't a storyline that worked for me. Holding Lorenzo responsible for her predicament and expecting him to become her "patron" (which meant becoming his prostitute/call girl) was immature and childish for a woman her age. She was a stripper during the week and a ballerina on the weekend. Really? She never considered herself a prostitute, even though that what she was. Her begging/graveling for sex with Lorenzo throughout much of the book grew very tiresome and degraded her character.

Lorenzo goes from a man that won't pay Mila for sex, but will pay her to sell drugs. The slow moving banter between the two characters that finally lead to them sleeping together was too long and then their sex life goes from 1-100. Mila is an exhibitionist that gets off on people watching her whether she is stripping, dancing or having sex. The end of the book was just okay because the author brings the "sex club" element into the story to satisfy Mila's need to be seen while having sex. It detracted from a story that could have been a sensual love story/relationship vs., one embroiled in voyeurism and an immature heroine. No doubt that some of those attending the ballet performances and gala's will one day be watching Mila and Lorenzo having sex at the club.

Move over Lorenzo.

[R M · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars DNF.

2 stars. DNF
I’m so sad about this book. Usually M James’ mafia related books are intriguing and very quick reads. (Because the characters and action pull you in).
This was so boring. Repetitive. She wants him. He wants her. He gives in a little, then goes cold as stone.
There’s no story here. At least not up to the 50% mark, which is where I had to throw in the towel.

[Tinamarie Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark Mafia

Highly recommend Brutal Desire 💋 Loved Dante’s and Emma’s Story than continuing with Lorenzo and Mila was just fabulous. Even though they are standalone’s you must read Carnal Desire first. This was my first 2 books that I’ve read 📕 from M.James and can’t wait to start reading more❤️

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF @ 25% Not even close to being as good as Dante’s book. Slow going. Depressing back story for Mika. I can’t handle people taking advantage of someone in dire straits. Internal monologues galore.
2*not for me*stars!!!!

[Lisa Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh my loved it

Ohh my I loved the book , great characters and storyline, the way these men will do anything for their family and the women they want no matter what

[Aaliyah Mallard · Rating 3 out of 5]

It felt a little too cheesy to be a dark romance but I liked it !

[Robyn Roarks · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a great book! definitely recommend

[Lisa Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been a wonderful book, lots of action too

[Devina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I will always think about this one, I loved their story this series got me out of book slump.