Guarded by the Kraken (Monster Security Agency, #4)

by Cassie Alexander

“It’s like staring into the abyss, huh?” Donna asked. “Yeah,” I whispered. And just like in the proverb—somehow I knew the abyss was staring back.

Sets the mood of ominous wonderment.

Everyone always assumed you went into monster sciences to fuck them. “I study dead monster languages and cultures. It’s different.”

I feel like this sums up why this book goes deeper than most monster smut. It also made me laugh.

Because we weren’t bonded yet, our contact was merely physical, although my suckers began reporting in all of her minutia. Her wrist was small. Her bones, delicate. I could feel the thrum of her pulse, and the slight heat radiating from her body. And her taste . . . a lick of salt, the last chemicals in which she’d bathed, and something beneath both of those, something inexorably hers—I wanted more of it, and I wound her ankles readily, without thinking.

Oh, Ceph. You are so gone.

The man—I mean, kraken!—was dragging up cables like he was working out to audition for the lead in a Marvel franchise. His shoulders and arms were layered with muscle, his chest was wide, and it drifted down to an exceptionally chiseled stomach, below which his hips were wrapped with a belt that had pockets, and beneath that, instead of legs, he had a kilt of muscle, leading down into eight long, strong separate tentacles.

I love the idea of a kilt made of muscle.

He was singing me a children’s lullaby. I supposed I ought to be embarrassed, as a grown woman—but the linguist in me was charmed, because I was fairly certain no other human had ever heard a kraken’s song before.

Gah. It’s moments like this.

“You are the first sentient creature I have touched in three years. There are no others, nor will there be.” I watched her swallow again. “Anyone ever tell you you come on a little strong?”

Big grin here.

“You cut off your very breasts to defeat death. There is nothing that can stop you.”

Swoon. Ceph is such a beautiful person.

Small was not the first adjective that I would use for the apparent kraken dildo I was holding in my hand.

I loved Elle’s earthiness and wry sense of humor.