Drawn Together by Lauren Dane (Brown Siblings #6)
Contemporary Romance
October 1, 2013
Penguin

Reviewed by Helyce

Beauty is more than skin-deep…
Tattoo artist Raven Smith is blunt and hard, broken and jaded, dark and beautiful. While she doesn’t hide her painful past, she does keep a wall around her heart. She’s free sexually—but no one gets to the real Raven beneath the prickly exterior.
With a voice like smoke, Jonah Warner is a smooth-talking, highly successful attorney, with a body that should never be hidden by a suit. He’s the kind of man who never takes no for an answer and always gets what he wants. And what he wants is Raven. She’s a survivor, and he finds that incredibly alluring.
Jonah gets under her skin in a way Raven has never experienced. He makes her break all her rules—including her no-monogamy rule.
But when a figure from Raven’s past shows up at the tattoo parlor and drops a bomb into her life, their relationship will face the ultimate challenge. (Goodreads)

Raven has long been a character that I’ve loved to hate. She’s always been quite the bitch, and she makes no apologies for herself. A talented tattoo artist, she’s also a free spirit and she moves through life going wherever she wants to, whenever she wants to. That is until her dearest friends start finding love and having children. Now she finds herself making a more permanent home in Seattle, wanting to be nearer to these friends who have become more her family than her blood relatives.

When Raven meets Jonah and they start dating, I was totally thrown for a loop. We still got the Raven that goes after what she wants, but her demeanor was somehow different and I was intrigued. Jonah seemed to bring out a different Raven and I wasn’t really sure if I liked her. But Jonah is all that and then some-so I was very interested to see where Ms. Dane planned to take us.

What she gives us is Raven’s back story and it explains so much about the Raven of the early books. At the same time, however, learning that Raven endured abuse of all kinds, neglect and a really horrific betrayal, caused me much confusion with respect to Raven and her acceptance of the type of sexual relationship she had with Jonah. Jonah is a dominant and it didn’t sit well with me that this type of sexual play worked for Raven because of her past. Everything is completely consensual-so perhaps her being able to make this choice was all the author was going for. But even as we got to know more about Raven and witnessed her relationship to Jonah blossom, I couldn’t get rid of the niggling feeling I had about this one issue.

Jonah is basically perfect. Handsome, successful, rich-he gently pushes Raven because he truly wants her. He’s willing to wait her out, but it doesn’t take too much once he asks her to do a large tattoo on his back for him. His immediate support of Raven as she deals with a secret that was kept from her won my approval in huge ways. Jonah comes from a stronger family unit, so it’s natural for him to provide this kind of support to Raven and I loved how the author built their relationship this way.

We are treated to visits from most if not all previous characters, which is something I truly look forward to in Dane’s series. Here too we see a different Raven. We see her ‘softer side’ as she interacts with the children of her friends. We also meet Jonah’s family and there is much entertainment to be had by them. I love how Dane portrayed and then handled the situation with Jonah’s sister in law who we first met in Sway. This woman is the definition of “bitch” and she certainly gets hers in here.

Ms. Dane is brilliant at bringing in secondary characters that, even though their parts are small, they feed the story well and they intrigue us and leave us wanting. She did this in here with Jonah’s brothers. I can only hope that she has plans for the Warner men as these are stories I look forward to reading.

Drawn Together surprised me in both good and bad ways. While I had a little trouble with the fact that Raven was comfortable with Jonah’s dominant side, I really liked them together. Getting Ravens back story and knowing everything that happened to her, even though I had already imagined it, made her finding Jonah-who really was her other half-very satisfying.

Rating: B

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