Bared to You by Sylvia Day

Carla: They are really messed up emotionally. Sex is good, but sometimes even that is too much.

Susan: Sylvia Day is vastly in tune to what women fantasize about and feeds their imagination in her latest contemporary romance Bared to You. Eva Tramell, a recent college graduate who moves from San Diego to New York City to take a job as an administrative assistant at a major advertising firm, encounters the handsomest man she’s ever met in her life at her place of work. Gideon Cross, a real estate mogul who heads and owns Crossfire Industries is a client of Waters Field & Leaman, the advertising firm that Eva works for and soon becomes the man that inflames her carnal desires.

Day gradually makes arrangements for these two to come together. Their intimate interludes blossom into something more as they reveal vulnerabilities they’ve never shared with any other partner. Eva confides in Gideon about being molested as a child by her stepfather Nathan. The experience left her scarred causing her to be fearful of sexual contact.

Gideon’s issues have also scarred him causing him to be impaired when it comes to intimacy. At five years old, his father committed suicide and shortly thereafter, his mother Elizabeth remarried moving her focus away from Gideon and paying more attention to his half brother Christopher Vidal who is now head of Vidal Records. His distrust of Christopher prevents him from nurturing a family bond which results in Gideon’s inability to form family ties. The impairment causes him to be promiscuous which adds to his other issue of being a sexual parasomniac, otherwise known as the disorder sexsomia or sleep sex. He has sexual-oriented attacks in the middle of the night which rouses Eva’s memories of being molested.

Day plants the seeds for a compelling story that addresses current disorders and relatable vulnerabilities. The language she uses is coarse many times as she concentrates on Eva and Gideon’s earthy, lusty and emotional traits. Women’s fantasies are lived out in the sex scenes between Eva and Gideon but they don’t seem to rise up to the level of making love. Eva and Gideon’s saga will continue in Day’s forthcoming novel Deeper in You.

As for likeability, Eva is a typical young woman making her way in the world veritably on her own. She does have one crutch, her bisexual friend Cary Taylor who is mixed in his own love triangle. Gideon’s crutches are slightly different. They consist of his previous paramours such as Magdalene Perez and Corinne Giroux, but nor does he cut them loose, which stirs Eva’s jealousy.

Eva and Gideon walk the earth as two wounded animals who don’t want to leave each other and are too afraid to move onto the next level of caring about each other as husband and wife. Their bond grows out of their understanding and acceptance of each other’s flaws and imperfections, but is it enough to hold them together?