Book Review: Buttons & Loyalty

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

What It’s About: Vanessa goes out with Matteo to a restaurant, and while they’re talking, she gets a message from Bones saying that he’s a boy. He eventually reveals to Vanessa that he’s at the bar, and she sees him. She invites Matteo over to her apartment for a night together, and then makes her way there, going up into her apartment, where she gets intercepted by Bones. Bones pleads with her to not go through the one night stand, because this will hurt them both, and she will regret it, though he says that he’d rather she continue to hurt him by not saying that she loves him. Vanessa agrees, and when Matteo comes in, she doesn’t go through with the sex.

Bones keeps coming around, asking for Vanessa to let it go, and give them a chance to have a relationship together, but Vanessa continues to deny him. Finally fed up and ready to move on, he goes to the club where he meets up with Max, who is happy that he’s coming out finally. Vanessa enters the club, and Bones sees her, but chooses to focus on the girl that he’s talking to in order to move on. Vanessa sees Bones too, and it hurts her that Bones is talking to another girl, seemingly not paying attention to her. Then Bones leaves with the woman to the car, and Vanessa gets sick to her stomach, so she runs after Bones and tells him that she wants him, and only him; that she loves him. He comes home with her, and they have sex in her bed. Vanessa asks him for his name so that she can say his real name in bed, and he agrees under the caveat that she say it only in bed–it’s Griffin. She ends up calling out his name when she comes.

They start to and continue to see each other, while Vanessa hides the relationship from her parents during their visits to Milan. At one point, Vanessa returns home with Sapphire and Pearl after a day of shopping for Wedding Dresses for Sapphire, and Bones overhears the women’s convo about Matteo. When they’re gone, he tells Vanessa that she needs to tell Matteo that he’s nobody, but Vanessa tells him that Matteo never really interested her, and it doesn’t make sense to do that because it may get back to her father, which they don’t want. At one point, Bones takes Vanessa out to meet his buddies, which are three other men and Max, and they make up the group of hitmen for hire. During the conversation, Max and the men are ribbing him that he’s on the same path as Shane, one of the guys there who is married, and Bones tells them that Vanessa is his Second. The guys realize he’s serious about her, and lay off. On the way home, Vanessa asks him what that means, and he tells her that her being his second means that in the event that something happens to him, the team looks after her and cares for her, ensuring that all of his money and estate goes to her so she can continue living on; essentially she’s his second in command.

Bones has to go on a mission, and during this mission Shane gets shot. He takes a helicopter out with Shane to a safer location, and waits for Shane to get out of surgery. Luckily, Shane makes it out, but his wife is in hysterics when she hears that he had nearly gotten shot. Bones is so glad that he’s going home to Vanessa, safe and sound. In the meantime, Vanessa goes out with her parents in Milan to Matteo’s house. After the dinner, Crow approaches her and tells her that he sees she’s not interested in Matteo and tells her that love only happens once, and to not let it slip through her fingers because it won’t happen again. He also tells her that he’d love to meet the man she loves–the man from the painting.

Vanessa asks Bones to meet her parents, and Bones doesn’t agree with it, at first. Then when he agrees, he tells her how to do it–at her parent’s house, with her father and Cane, but without her mother. He tells her that she will have to handcuff him to the chair, and then hand over a rifle/gun to her father. It’s the only way that her father will understand and be willing to even accept it. Vanessa doesn’t like it, but agrees, so they do the five hour drive from Milan to Tuscany, and Vanessa calls her father when she’s close to their house, asking that he bring Cane. She goes into the house alone, and tells Crow and Cane that she’s in love with the son of Bones, who also goes by the name of Bones. Both men are enraged, but she asks that they keep an open mind. She goes out to Bones, and walks him in with a shotgun to his back. Then she chains him to the chair, and puts the shotgun on the table, which Crow picks up, opens to see that there are two bullets, and points it at Bones. They talk, and Crow doesn’t like it at all going as far as insulting Bones by saying that it’s a good riddance his mother is gone. Bones doesn’t retaliate, and instead leaves to drink at the bar in Florence. Vanessa, Crow and Pearl talk, and Crow insults Vanessa, who is shocked at her father’s cruelty. She starts to leave, by walking out to give Bones a call, when Pearl tells Crow to stop with the cruelty and just talk it out. So Crow and Vanessa talk it out, and both Crow and Pearl agree to give Bones a Chance. Vanessa calls Bones back to the house to pick her up, and he sees Pearl for the first time, introducing himself as Griffin to her instead of Bones. Pearl asks him if he saw the painting that Vanessa did of him, and he says that he did. Vanessa and Bones drive home and have sex.

My Thoughts: I was so heartbroken about how Vanessa treated him at first, and then super happy about them coming together at the club, when she realizes that she can’t live without him. But I think that the most gutting part of it is just how reactive Crow and Pearl are towards Bones–how they hold what his father did to Pearl over his head, and treat him as the same type of man as his father, not even giving Bones a chance or choosing to look at it from the perspective that maybe, just maybe Bones is nothing like his father because he was never influenced by the guy in the first place. I really hope that the next book in the series furthers Bones & Vanessa’s relationship and they get a chance to prove to Crow that he’s really in it for the long haul. I think if Crow really lets go of what Bones Sr. did to Pearl and looks at Bones as his own person, they could have a father-son relationship that would be extremely beneficial to Bones. And Pearl could be his mom, a stand in for the one that he lost so tragically at Christmastime.