Book Review: Buttons & Shame

Title: Buttons & Shame
Author: Penelope Sky
Genre: Romance, Dark Romance, Fiction

What It’s About: Pearl is busy re-decorating her room with Crow, who in turn visits his brother Cane to discuss his upcoming trip to sell certain weapons they’ve developed. Cane heads out of Italy via a flight, and at the airport, he overhears a command from a raspy voice to a different person. He looks around to see a pretty girl that he tries talking to but she tells him to leave him alone as her boyfriend is going to come back and make things worse.

He goes to southern France, and after a few days of staying around and enjoying the nightlife there, Cane meets with Tristian–a formidable ally–who wants to buy some weapons from Cane. Tristian has his men bring a whore to the table, and Cane immediately recognizes her as the girl from the airport. Then Tristian has her tied up to bed, and gives Cane the opportunity to fuck her. Cane does try to go ahead with it but cannot do it, especially after the girl asks him to not do anything to her. Instead he licks her and makes her come. When he comes out, Tristian has decided to take the offer; however, he doesn’t have all of the money available. Tristian offers Cane a whore in exchange, but Cane doesn’t want her–instead he asks for the other girl, who is Tristian’s girl. At first Tristian denies his request, but when Cane is ready to walk away from the deal, Tristian agrees with a caveat–the girl is on loan to Cane until he gets the rest of the money in 31 days. He then shoves her towards Cane, who covers her up with his jacket, and takes her home to his apartment.

At his apartment, he has a doctor do a check up on her, even though she doesn’t want him to do it, so he has to hold her down to tell her that he doesn’t want to get anything from Tristian as he plans to fuck her without condoms. He then inserts a tracker into her. When Crow finds out that only half of the money has been placed in the account, he’s furious–and Cane admits that he took one of Tristian’s girls in exchange for a half o the money, with the intention of returning her back to Tristian at the end of thirty-one days. Crow doesn’t like it, but Cane gets him to back off; that he’s got it all under control.

He leaves the girl alone for the most part, letting her heal and eat while she lives with him in his new home that he purchased not too far off from his brother’s. And he doesn’t force her to have sex with him, but only takes what she’s willing to give him–though he reminds her that he’s not a patient man. He does end up having sex with her in the end, and she loves it. Cane does talk to Tristian once, and he reveals that the girl’s name is Adelina, and that she was captured in Greece with her friend, Lizzie. He’s threatened to kill Lizzie in order to get Adelina to cooperate with them.

Pearl finds out about the girl, and is furious about the whole situation and takes it out on Crow and Cane–Crow most of all because he’s the one who saved her. But in the end, both men agree that there isn’t much to be done, especially when they realize that Adalina won’t leave or forget about her friend, Lizzie with whom she has been close friends with since the 5th grade. The men did try to figure out what they could do about it, but it was obvious that she wasn’t willing to let go of Lizzie or be uncooperative in any way that would lead to Lizzie’s demise.

Adelina reveals that she had gotten into a taxi with Lizzie on their way to someplace in Greece–they had both just graduated and were planning on celebrating their graduation with this trip. And suddenly, their heads were covered with burlaps sacks–Lizzie tried to throw herself on top of her when they got to the compound with Tristian in order to protect Adelina, but he pushed her aside, and raped Adalina, who until that moment had been a virgin. And since then, he’d threatened her with Lizzie’s death if she didn’t cooperate with him, and often beat her, starved her and didn’t treat her humanely.

During the 31 days that Adelina is with Cane, she spends a lot of time with Pearl at the winery, and Cane also takes her sight-seeing around Italy, choosing to miss days of work to do this with her as he knows that her time is short-lived. Adalina knows she will have to go back to Tristian, but she has asked Cane if he would be able to get his hands on something that she could take that would make it look like she died naturally. He gets her cyanide which will induce a heart attack in her body, but doesn’t give it to her yet. Adalina does ask Cane if she could call her parents to let them know that she’s okay. He doesn’t let her because he knows that phones are easily tapped and easily accessed, that Tristian will find out and he would get into trouble–Cane doesn’t want to get into trouble with the law either.

Instead, he actually takes her on a flight to South Carolina and then drives her to her parent’s house at one in the morning. He just can’t get over the fact that if he had one more night–the last night–with Vanessa before she died, it would’ve been different. So he lets her go over to her house, and Adelina talks to her parents for a while, telling them as much of what has happened to her as she can without getting into grisly territory that would leave them heartbroken. She does tell them that she has to go back to captivity because of Lizzie, and her parents have a hard time with it, but they let her go, though they do want to meet Cane. She introduces them and they thank him for bringing her home so they can be in peace. Then they fly back home to Italy.

My Thoughts: I am loving the development of Pearl’s and Crow’s relationship throughout this book, but more so than that, I love seeing Cane’s perspective on things; how he’s changed because of Pearl. You certainly see so much character growth with Cane because he realizes that Adelina is no better off than Pearl was with Bones, but with a much crueler man. Whatever Pearl went through certainly impacts Cane because he’s more tender and kinder with Adelina, giving her the space and time to heal-something that he normally wouldn’t have done before. I’m curious to see the next part in the series, and whether Cane will admit his feelings for Adelina and keep her.