Review: No Pain, No Gain by Ari McKay

Title: No Pain, No Gain

Series: Herc’s Mercs: Book Seven

Author: Ari McKay

Length: 219 Pages

Category: Contemporary, BDSM

At a Glance: I truly enjoyed this installment in the Herc’s Mercs universe and would definitely recommend it. Mind the trigger warnings—the brutalities of war are not pretty, especially when they call for life-ending heroics on the part of our servicemen.

Reviewed By: Carrie

Blurb: Hunter Callahan loved being a merc. As an explosives expert for Lawson & Greer, he’s dealt with everything from IEDs to rogue nukes. But when a suicide bomber in the form of a seven-year-old boy walks into camp, Hunter learns there are some fates far worse than death.

Payne Gibson recognizes the “thousand yard stare” of the PTSD Hunter refuses to acknowledge, and as a natural caretaker, he can’t resist when his boss, Cade “Hercules” Thornton, asks him to help. Hunter is resistant until their surveillance assignment turns dangerous, and Hunter realizes he’s in danger of losing his career, the only thing in his life that matters to him anymore.

Conventional therapy hasn’t worked, so Payne suggests an unorthodox form of therapy: BDSM. As a Dom, Payne thinks he can help Hunter face the issues he’s been avoiding. Having come to trust Payne and knowing his career is on the line, Hunter agrees to try.

Their relationship as Dom and sub deepens more than either of them expected. Payne knows adding emotions into the mix is dangerous, but he can’t help it when Hunter is both the man and the sub Payne has hoped to find. But Hunter doesn’t feel he deserves love, not when his best friend is dead because of him, leaving behind a wife and child to mourn — and to blame Hunter for their loss.

Payne can help Hunter to stare into the abyss… but what stares back might be more intense than either of them can handle.

Review: No Pain, No Gain is book number seven in the Herc’s Mercs universe, and I think it’s one of the best. I think Ari McKay had to fight with this one, so each word on the page was important. This story deals with a character that has PTSD, a pretty severe case of it, and you can literally feel Ari McKay trying to keep the storyline light while giving this disease the seriousness and the weight it deserves. The BDSM in this book is used as an alternative therapy and as such, isn’t the focus of the relationship between the MCs. It is a tool used to bring catharsis to a man who feels he is broken mentally, and it is dragging him down physically. I actually wish there were more “fun” scenes between the two; they tended to happen off screen. The scenes we are privy too are heavy and soul searching, which therapy generally is. I want to say that the Dom in this book has training and advanced degrees in psychology and as such, he treats this with almost a clinical but wholly compassionate overtone. Not once does the author say that BDSM can “cure” anything, but it can provide a release which helps certain types of individuals let go. This book has an older/bigger sub and a younger/slimmer Dom, but don’t let Payne’s size fool you… kinda like Hunter does. Payne puts Hunter on his knees from the get-go, in more than one way.

Hunter Callahan is a merc. He loves being one. He’s never wanted to do anything else. He figures he’ll die that way, on a mission somewhere. Hunter is all alone in the world—except for his best friend, Mark. When Mark is the one to die, Hunter spirals out of control and has no one to help him. His bosses at Greer and Lawson know that Hunter is a ticking time bomb, even if he has convinced all the military’s psychologists that he is fine. They don’t believe him and won’t put him back into the field until they know for sure he won’t go suicidal and inadvertently take others with him when he goes. Mark’s death was brutal but heroic, leaving behind a wife and small boy. Hunter can’t get past the survivor’s guilt, not to mention the horror and aftermath of the explosion.

Payne’s been in combat. He’s done his time in the military. As a member of Herc’s crew he uses his background and master’s in psychology to help with missions and the people who run them. When Payne sees Hunter the first time, he recognizes a brilliant man who is locked inside his own head, fighting the demons that live there, and he cannot escape them. Payne is a compassionate man by nature, a nurturer and a healer. Being of shorter stature in a world of oversized beefcake men means Payne is often overlooked or underestimated. But don’t let that fool you; he’s a member of the merc team for a reason. The man can handle his own, as Hunter finds out pretty quickly.

We don’t get a whole lot of new information about Payne in this book—we’ve run into him before, of course, and knew of his character from former books in the series. This book tends to focus on Hunter, though, and Payne just fulfills the role we knew he could play. The romance is on a slow burn. The chemistry is immediate, but the romance takes some time as Hunter heals, which is perfectly understandable. The connection that Hunter and Payne develop, while solid, takes some imagination as it doesn’t quite happen on the page. I would have loved some good BDSM scenes that were not about the therapy and just about establishing a romantic connection between the two MCs.

I truly enjoyed this installment in the Herc’s Mercs universe and would definitely recommend it. Mind the trigger warnings—the brutalities of war are not pretty, especially when they call for life-ending heroics on the part of our servicemen. This book was less about the mission and more about the men and, overall, I enjoyed reading it. I recommend all the books in this series, but No Pain, No Gain is one of my favorites.

You can buy No Pain, No Gain here:
[zilla_button url=”http://authl.it/B079YJLRR5?d” style=”blue” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]