Book Review - Mob Mistress by Renee Rose

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Only just this minute realised that the 'r' in Mistress is actually a gun.

Five Stars!

Despite my professed preference for All Things Historical, I can get as giddily as excited by a modern day romance as the next spanko. I absolutely loved and adored Renee Rose's The Bossman which is a modern-day romance about falling in love with a mobster.

In fact I loved it so much, that when I was briefly considering a career in book plagiarism, The Bossman was the book I started with because as I said at the time, "it's brilliant and sexy and far better than anything I could write. And if I am going to embark on a new life of criminality I want to be doing it for the right reasons - bitterness and jealousy."

When I reviewed The Bossman for Spanking Romance Reviews, I finished off by saying that I didn't want Renee to write a sequel. "Not because I don’t want to spend any more time with Sophie and Joey – far from it. I just don’t want them to have any more drama in their lives. They've had enough excitement. I am happy to leave them to the quiet uneventful life that they both crave."

Luckily Renee has found a way to write a sequel while still keeping me happy (and I assume that my continued happiness is the primary motivating factor behind Renee's writing career) by returning to the sexy Mafia world while leaving Sophie and Joey very firmly in the background enjoying marital bliss and the pleasures of parenthood.

Mob Mistress focuses on Joey's cousin, Bobby Manghini, an accountant working at the slightly more legitimate end of "The Family"'s business dealings. He's in the market for a new mistress and when his path crosses with Lexi, a down-on-her-luck hairdresser on the receiving end of  string of financial misfortunes - he wants to persuade her that he would be excellent Sugar Daddy material.

Despite the fact that Lexi only agrees to his proposal because she is up to her eyeballs in medical bills, debts and overdue rent, there is a fairly lovely and believable rapport between the two of them from their very first meeting. It is on the face of it, an utterly cold-blooded and mercenary arrangement. "Here’s the deal." says Bobby, early on. "You make yourself available to me. If you’re not working at the hair salon, your time is mine. You don't have to sit around and wait for me—I’ll text you in advance, but you don’t tell me you're busy, got it? If you have plans, you change them."

It's hard to believe that such an arrangement - with a member of the bloody Mafia, no less - could result in such a sweet and romantic storyline. But you know Renee Rose. "Sweet and Romantic" is her middle name.

In fact, I am going to assume that is literally true from now on

Lexi believes that Bobby is married mainly because he doesn't give her any reason to think otherwise. He's actually divorced but likes to keep all the sections of his life neatly compartmentalised. Which is why he likes to keep his mistresses tucked away tidily and out of sight until he wants to play.

And he really does love to play. The sex is fantastically written. There is one standing-up-against-the-wall sex scene early on in the story that got me terribly excited. Renee has a knack of describing such scenes in a way that makes it oh-so-easy to visualise.

And then there are the spankings. Of course there are. Bobby Manghini is very fond of spanking. Mostly the spankings are the fun, sexy type but there is also a wonderfully disciplinary spanking with a belt which Bobby administers after Lexi crosses a line in Bobby's neatly compartmentalised life. That's a very distracting scene, that one. In fact it caused me to miss my tube stop when I read it. You try giving that as an excuse for why you're late to work. (There are all kinds of disadvantages to reading Renee's books on trains, mind you. Lack of privacy for one thing.)

Not the most conducive of environments for engaging in a spot of self-love.

I probably enjoyed Mob Mistress even more than The Bossman. It's a close run thing, though. I'd rather not choose between those two mafia boys. They're both utterly delightful. How on earth does Renee Rose manage to write such engagingly lovely characters when they are both involved in the seedy world of underground crime? I should dislike both these people intensely. Instead I'd rather like to hang out with them. Particularly if said 'hanging out' involved a trip over one or other their laps.

I have no idea how Renee does it. It's probably witchcraft. I'm incredibly glad that she does, though. I hope there are more spanky mobsters to come! They're just so terribly good at the disciplinary stuff, apparently.

Bunty Comics made me a Spanko!

If I were the sort of person to spend time analysing why I am quite so obsessed with all things spanking, then I think DC Thomson & Co, the publishers of girls’ comics such Bunty and Nikki,  would have a lot to answer for.

As it happens, I am not that sort of person. Spanking is just awesome. I may as well waste time trying to work out why I like kissing. Or orgasms.

But if girls’ comics of the 1980s didn’t make me into a spanko, they certainly tapped into that part of my psyche at quite an early age. I don’t know if other countries had comics like Bunty. That and Nikki were the two that I used to read regularly but there were a whole slew of them back then – Judy, Mandy, Tammy, Jinty, Misty (ending in –y was essential for some reason).

I totally failed to win one of those Swingballs. I'm not bitter.

Each issue would contain seven or eight serial stories spreading over several weeks. There was usually something pony related, something about a girl with dreams of becoming a ballerina, something set in the future with comical robots as well as an impressive number of stories of young girls doing jobs – dog trainer, fashion designer, secret agent, brain surgeon – that you’d think would be difficult to break into when you’re twelve years old. And there was always, always a story about Victorian orphans having a terrible time of it.

Not surprisingly, the Victorian miserylit stories were my favourite. Stories I remember include

• Callous Cassie in which a young woman pretends to be as cruel as the other teachers in the school in which she works in order not to be discovered secretly helping the girls under her care. 
• Workhouse Wendy where the protagonist’s plans to go undercover at a workhouse in order to expose its cruel practises goes horribly awry.
• School for the Forgotten which was all about, oh I can’t remember, relentless misery and beatings probably. They all were.

·        Chief amongst these stories was Bunty’s School for the Unwanted Ones. Following the death of her father, our hero, Valerie Matthews was packed off to an academy run by the cruel Dr Croome and his bevy of equally sadistic staff. If you were looking for a story in which girls were frequently physically punished with a variety of different implements (and it turns out eleven-year-old-me kind of was) then this was the story for you.

I certainly remembered a panel in which Val was bent over a stool in the headmaster’s study and struck with a tawse. Although Google image isn’t helping me out with that particular one,  I found a few other punishments from School for the Unwanted Ones because, happily, that sort of thing just kept happening to the characters. Every single week. Like I said, they were having a terrible time of it.

I’m not saying that the frequent depictions of girls getting spanked or caned in girls comics was necessarily an indication of any particular perviness on the part of the writers. Little girls do just love reading about other little girls suffering horribly. And the writers were happy to lay the misery and suffering on with a trowel. Tammy had a story called The Slaves of War Orphan Farm which ought to win some kind of award for the most gleefully appalling title ever given to something aimed at children.

You didn’t even need to be stuck in the Victorian times for awful things to happen to you in Buntyworld. One story, The Courage of Crippled Clara subjected its protagonist to a level of physical chastisement that I remember finding somewhat startling at the time. And intriguing, obviously. She gets spanked with a belt by her father and then caned at school by the headmistress for relatively minor offences just because the local Lord of the Manor has taken against her and apparently that’s enough to get you punished by all and sundry. Not that I had any great love for The Courage of Crippled Clara. Maybe I preferred my punished heroines to be living in the previous century. Or maybe it was because it was basically another variant of a pony story and I was definitely not the kind of girl who spent her weekends mucking out stables.

Not that kind of pony story. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Mostly, I think my indifference came from the fact that the artwork was a bit shit. It certainly stuck in my mind, though. In fact, in the almost thirty years since I was a regular subscriber to Bunty and Nikki, the stories have stayed with me. It might not have been great literature but it was absorbing and entertaining. And sometimes it involved girls my own age being bent over and beaten. Much like the stories I made up in my head at the time.

Those kinds of comics are gone now. Bunty, one of the first, was the last to bow out in 2001. And by then the format had changed out of all recognition as it aped the glossy magazine style of women’s magazines.

I want to believe there would still be a market for those kinds of serial stories amongst nine to twelve year olds now. Back then the comics were produced on the cheapest possible paper with only a couple of the pages boasting full colour. You only got a free gift once a year in order to soften to the 2p price hike.

And those gifts were fucking terrible.

Comics cost about 16p when I was a regular reader which barely made a dent in my £1.50 pocket money. In fact, a copy of Bunty cost about the same as a Cadbury’s Flake.  You’d be hard pressed to buy a kid’s magazine for less than three quid these days. So unless youngsters are regularly getting £30 a week pocket money, comic buying has become a fuck of a lot more expensive. They’ve become glossier and now give you a free gift every single week, sure, but they’ve rather overtaken the Cadbury’s Flake in terms of retail price.

All of which makes me sound like the most tedious sort of “It were better in my day”-spouting old person. “You young people, with your  overpriced Disney comics and your ‘interactive media’ bollocks. We had proper comics in my day. With proper actual child cruelty. Not like your namby-pamby non-child-beating nonsense you get these days. It was absolutely brilliant.”

"The Final Straw" A Short Story

In a few week's time , I shall be attending Smut Manchester which is described on their website as "an Erotica Authors & Readers Smutty Social Get-Together" It's terribly exciting. Every word in that description describes me to a tee. I'm smutty! I'm social! I'm an erotic writer AND an erotic reader. Clearly, it's time for me to go forth and meet my people.

My people are kinky people, obvs

Part of the getting-together socialness of the event, is a 'Flash Challenge' which is a writing competition (and not a competitive flashing event as you might have supposed).

Entrants are required to write a 1000 word story using the photograph below of the Manchester Wheel as inspiration. The top three entries will be read out by the authors at the event which is fairly terrifying prospect.

My entry which is titled "The Final Straw" is below. 

Let me know what you think in the comments. And give me a shout if you're planning to come to Smut Manchester on the 15th. It is of course where the very best smutty, social, erotic, got-together people will be.

The Final Straw

She squinted  slightly and pulled a disappointed face. “It’s not very big is it?”

“What?”

“The wheel. It’s much smaller than the London Eye. Seems a bit daft to come up here and then go on a sub-standard wheel.”

Joel let out a long exasperated breath. “You don’t want to go on it then?”

Katy shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”

“Whatever. I’m not going on it with you if you’re going to spend the whole time comparing it unfavourably with your London one.”

“Our London one. You live in London too.”

“Yeah but Manchester’s where I grew up. That was the point of us doing this trip together. But all you’ve done is put the place down. Manchester bars aren’t as good as London bars. The Manchester Museum isn’t as good as the British Museum.  I’ve had enough of it. I’m going back to the hotel.”

Joel strode off, not too bothered if Katy followed him or not.  She caught up with him and walked with him back to the hotel. When they got back to their room, Joel  grabbed a beer from the mini-fridge and stared moodily out the window at Piccadilly Gardens and the wheel.

“What do you want to do?” asked Katy.

Joel shrugged. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to bend Katy over his knee and spank her ungrateful little arse. She’d done nothing but snip and complain since they’d arrived in Manchester.

He had never spanked Katy. Never spanked anyone, in fact, but it was something that he thought about a lot. In great Technicolor detail.

He looked over at his girlfriend. She was beautiful, absolutely stunning. Shame about the bad-tempered look she was wearing. Yet she’d submissively followed him back here without a word. She now seemed to be awaiting his instructions. His cock stirred at the thought of it. Why, he wondered, didn’t he just spank her? Maybe that was what she’d been angling for with her bratty behaviour. It was certainly what she deserved.

He set down his beer and sat on the edge of the bed. “Come here,” he commanded.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to give you a damn good spanking.”

“You’re going to spank me because I wouldn’t go on the wheel?” Katy asked incredulously.

“No, I am going to spank you because you've behaved like a spoilt brat since we got here. The wheel was just the final straw. Now, get over my knee. This will do us both good.”

A tiny, significant second ticked by. Everything hinged on her reaction. She could tell him go to hell. Or storm out. She could, quite feasibly laugh in his face,

But she didn’t do those things. Wonderfully, amazingly, she walked over to where Joel was sitting, her eyes focused on the floor, and laid herself awkwardly over his lap.

He pushed her skirt up to her waist and yanked her knickers to her knees.

“Are you going to use your belt on me, Joel?” Katy asked quietly.

Joel’s cock stiffened at her words. She was so up for this. “We’ll see,” he said, his voice rough with desire.

He spanked her hard and fast covering every inch of her from her waist to the top of her thighs. Her shapely arse changed colour from cream to the hottest hot pink.

Katy let out gasps and squeaks of protest every time Joel’s hand made contact with her flesh. Even though she was wriggling deliciously over his lap, Joel sensed that she wasn't moving as much as she wanted to. She was trying her hardest to be compliant. To submit.

He stopped spanking and admired the warm fiery glow of Katy’s bottom. He wasn’t through with her yet.  Loath as he was to move her from her delightful position, he knew he wasn’t going to get enough of a swing with his belt with her across his knees.

“Up you get,” he said brusquely and Katy jumped to her feet. “Over the bed, face down. You’re going to get whipped with my belt.”

Katy hesitated. “Didn’t I behave well enough during the spanking?”

“You behaved beautifully.” Joel reassured her. “That’s why you’re only going to get three swats with the belt. If you hadn't, it would have been much more. Although I'm going to add more strokes if you don’t lie down on the bed right this instant.”

Katy complied immediately.

He brought the belt down across her buttocks three times in swift succession. Then threw his belt to the floor and admired the three bright red lines running horizontally across Katy’s bottom. He didn’t think he'd ever seen anything more beautiful.

He climbed onto the bed and slipped his fingers between her legs feeling the inviting wetness of her delicious pussy.

“You enjoyed that didn’t you?” he whispered.

Katy didn’t look up. She nodded her head which was still buried in the duvet.

“Oh sweetheart, we are going to have so much fun with it,” he said softly, unbuttoning his jeans and releasing his stiff engorged cock. He entered her swiftly from behind, pounding into her to the sounds of her pleasure. She was already so close to orgasm he realised, He wondered if he could make her come just from spanking her alone? He'd like to try.

They lay together afterwards -  a sweaty, sticky, happy mess. “You were right,” she said. “That did do me good. Thank you.”

“You’re entirely welcome. We’re going to be doing it a lot more.” He smacked her reddened backside for emphasis.

“Shall we go on the Manchester Eye, now?” asked Katy, her eyes shining.

“I didn’t think you wanted to?”

“I’m growing fonder of the idea.”  There was a wicked glint in her eye. “You know, if I say anything unkind about it, you can always take me to task afterwards.”

Joel grinned. He rather hoped she would find something unkind to say about it. “Come on then sweetheart. We have some sightseeing to do.”

Why my hero won't use a belt

At the moment, I am writing my third book set in Victorian England. Much as I love writing about this particular period in history I have – for the third time – find myself cursing the restrictions that the men’s fashions of the day impose on a spanking author.

You see an Englishman in the 19^th century wouldn’t have worn a belt. He didn’t even have a place to put a belt on his trousers. The fashion was to have smooth high-waisted trousers which created a tidy silhouette. All very pretty but not much use to me when I want my hero to give a belt spanking to the heroine.

Phwoar

The belt is the perfect implement when you want a spanking to be impromptu enough for the protagonist not to have pre-arranged any implements, but still allow the characters to take things up a notch from a hand spanking. And I love a good belt spanking. I especially love the bit when the hero takes his belt off prior to chastisement.

Take this bit from Renee Rose’s modern day romance The Bossman:

“He smiled a slow, dangerous smile as he pulled the belt free of his belt loops and doubled it, smacking his palm with a resounding whap.”

Mmmmm. Oh wait, where was I?

Not that you have to set your story in the modern day to enjoy a bit of belt spanking. Belt wearing wasn’t unknown during the period I’m writing about. It just wasn’t going on it the bits of the world where my characters are.  Five thousand miles away in the Wild West, every guy had a convenient length of leather secured round his middle which he could use to redden the backside of a deserving young lady. No wonder everyone loves a cowboy romance.

Just look at the belts on those two.

It’s no good to me though. I have a young woman bent over a table in a furnished – but not lived in – gardener’s cottage and a stuffy Lord eager to give her the thrashing she deserves.

Previous protagonists have used a leather strap from a packing case and a razor strop to good effect but I can’t see why either of those things would be to hand in my current scenario. It’s so frustrating. I feel like I’m stuck in one of those 1980s text based computer games.

 What about a riding crop? Surely I could orchestrate a reason to have one nearby. I had considered a walking stick but that seemed a bit too brutal. Although having said that, take a look at the dapper young fellows in this drawing:

Every single one of them has elected to pose with the thinnest weediest looking walking stick imaginable. Those whippy little numbers would probably only be usefully employed in a spanking. I can’t imagine they would give you a lot of support if you wanted to go fell walking.

Clearly more research is in order, here.