Title: Heat for Sale
Author: Blake Moreno
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 192 Pages
Category: Mpreg, Omegaverse
At a Glance: Heat for Sale is very true to Rebecca, and stories like it, where the protagonist is swept into a whirlwind courtship. It’s a well-written, quick read with plenty of raunchy sex, fluids, and doesn’t trade on OTT, overdone angst when the big secret is revealed.
Reviewed By: Jovan
Blurb: Heat can be sold but love is earned.
In a world where omegas sell their heats for profit, Adrien is a university student in need of funding. With no family to fall back on, he reluctantly allows the university’s matcher to offer his virgin heat for auction online. Anxious, but aware this is the reality of life for all omegas, Adrien hopes whoever wins his heat will be kind.
Heath—a wealthy, older alpha—is rocked by the young man’s resemblance to his dead lover, Nathan. When Heath discovers Adrien is Nathan’s lost son from his first heat years before they met, he becomes obsessed with the idea of reclaiming a piece of Nathan.
Heath buys Adrien’s heat with only one motivation: to impregnate Adrien, claim the child, and move on. But their undeniable passion shocks him. Adrien doesn’t know what to make of the handsome, mysterious stranger he’s pledged his body to, but he’s soon swept away in the heat of the moment and surrenders to Heath entirely.
Once Adrien is pregnant, Heath secrets him away to his immense and secluded home. As the birth draws near, Heath grows to love Adrien for the man he is, not just for his connection to Nathan. Unaware of Heath’s past with his omega parent and coming to depend on him heart and soul, Adrien begins to fall as well.
But as their love blossoms, Nathan’s shadow looms. Can Heath keep his new love and the child they’ve made together once Adrien discovers his secrets?
Heat for Sale is a stand-alone m/m erotic romance by Leta Blake, writing as Blake Moreno. Infused with a du Maurier Rebecca-style secret, it features a well-realized omegaverse, an age-gap, dominance and submission, heats, knotting, and scorching hot scenes.
Review: Heat for Sale is a difficult book to review. It’s well-written, has an interesting world and premise, and is overall enjoyable, but left me with mixed feelings. Though mortified and scared about having to sell his first heat, Adrien must do so in order to fund his education and career goals. Being raised by only his alpha parent in a very strict, religious community, Adrien is shy, modest and has no clue what to expect from his heat. He simply does as he’s told by the university matchmaker who sets up the auction and hopes for the best. When Heath is told by his friend Felix that an omega is being auctioned that looks like Heath’s dead lover, Nathan, Heath becomes obsessed with the idea of breeding Adrien once he learns he was Nathan’s child so that he can possess a part of Nathan. Although a calculated plan, Heath failed to take into account his own penchant for becoming besotted by omegas in heat and that, while resembling his dead lover, Adrien is a person in his own right.
The book does a good job of explaining the characters’ motivations, particularly Heath’s since he has all the power in the story until the end. He is autocratic and demanding when he first meets Adrien, but not cold, which is a fine line to tread. However, he’s mostly trying to protect himself and his heart, as he is prone to getting too emotionally invested with omegas that do not want the same things in a relationship as he does. This was the main problem with his lover Nathan, Adrien’s father. Heath wanted a more traditional, one alpha-one omega relationship, but Nathan was a free spirit who, though he loved Heath in his own way, did not want to be monogamous with him—something Heath refused to accept. As incompatible as they were, Heath was obsessed with Nathan, even when he was cruel, and only sees Adrien as a mean to an end. Yet,
“with every moment [of Adrien’s heat], Adrien’s resemblance to Nathan faded away, replaced by the stunning transparency of his soul, the complete lack of machinations, and the sense that his future was still so unwritten, so blank and open. So potentially Heath’s.”
When Adrien becomes pregnant, Heath is given the opportunity to keep Adrien close and revel in his innocence and freely given submission. Soon, he and Adrien create a bubble out of time of sex and the joys of pregnancy, precariously hinged on Heath’s deception. As Simon, Heath’s former nanny and Adrien’s caretaker, points out, Heath refuses to face and deal with unpleasant truths “to the detriment of everyone around [him] and to [his] own goals.” It left him leading a miserable life with Nathan and leads him to hide the truth from Adrien, even after he develops feelings for him and knows he should come clean. He keeps disingenuously stressing to Adrien that the past does not matter and that only the future is important, when his past is what brought them together and can rip them apart, especially since everyone knows who Nathan was to Heath.
Adrien’s sheltered upbringing and naïveté make him the perfect little ingénu . . . male ingénue (mangenue?) . . . perfect little virgin archetype. He and Heath are similar in that they ignore unpleasant things, and so Adrien would rather not think about his upcoming heat until he has no choice. Additionally, even though he is dreading going through his heat with a stranger and knows almost nothing about something that will profoundly affect his life, he forgoes asking any questions of his well-informed omega friend Lance, nor does Lance offer much in the way of information, even knowing about Adrien’s strict religious background, making sure Adrien is as guileless and innocent as can be. By the time Adrien starts to learn anything about what he has signed up for, he is well and truly pregnant and floating hazily on a sea of feel-good pregnancy hormones. I think for me, this is where the disconnect of their “love” comes in. Apparently, in the intensity of heats, “heat crushes” are a common occurrence and if an omega becomes pregnant, the emotional bonding between the alpha and omega can grow, but if it’s all during an extreme alchemy of hormones, how lasting is it? It’s hard for me to see where Adrien got to know and fall in love with who Heath is as a person and not just Heath’s spunk (which acts like a calming sedative, no joke). Even within the haze of hormones, Adrien was questioning who Heath really was, and when he crashed after the birth, the questions were even more valid. . . and still not really answered.
I mean, they fit together in terms of what they need—Health needs an omega that lets him be dominant, Adrien needs someone to take control, and they both like monogamy—but other than that, it just felt weirdly empty in a way. Heath has honest and open conversations with Felix and Simon, but the majority of his interactions with Adrien don’t involve much beyond sex, dominance and lying by omission. Adrien is so high throughout his pregnancy that he doesn’t really question all he doesn’t know about Heath until long after the biochemical deal has been sealed. They have a child and are planning on spending their lives together, but most of what they know of each other was forged in an extremely potent hormonal soup over the course of four months, so the love, while real, seems shallow. I mean Adrien, doesn’t even know as small a detail as the fact that Heath works from home most of the time, which, of course, adds to his increasing after-birth panic that he really doesn’t know Heath, and adds to their later confrontation. The epilogue shows them still together, but for me, I would have liked to have seen what it was they loved about the other.
That being said, in this way the book is very true to Rebecca, and stories like it, where the protagonist is swept into a whirlwind courtship, with all the biochemical highs that lead to falling in love, only to be confronted with whether what they had in their solitary bubble can exist in the reality of everything they have yet to learn about each other. Heat for Sale is a well-written, quick read with plenty of raunchy sex, fluids, and doesn’t trade on OTT, overdone angst when the big secret is revealed.
You can buy Heat for Sale here:
[zilla_button url=”http://authl.it/B07JGDV4GK?d” style=”blue” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]
