I lost count of the number of times she calls him an asshole, and she even manages to get the better of him in a fight, knocking him unconscious!

He gives in to her constantly – agreeing to get her an entertainment unit so she won’t be bored, allowing her to speak to another prisoner, and so on. As for Iron, I think the author was going for the strong silent type, but he comes off as more bemused and/or cowed by Dawn’s attitude. This is… actually not how captivity works. After they have sex for the second time, she even tells him, “ If you own me, then I own your ass right back.” She has no particular goals or plans, so it’s as though she knows being his prisoner will work out fine in the end. I enjoy a good captor/captive dynamic if the captive can hold his or her own, but both Iron and Dawn are reduced to blandness when they’re with each other. She makes a deal with him – if he agrees not to let Cathy be harmed, Dawn will willingly sleep with him.

However, a huge cyborg called Iron foils her attempt to destroy his ship and takes her as his personal prisoner.

There’s a lot to like about Dawn she’s thirty-six, a welder and extremely gutsy when dealing with her captors. She believes cyborgs kidnap humans to steal their body parts, so right at the start, I figured these cyborgs weren’t likely to be half-mechanical creatures. Three other women have already been taken away, and these two have no idea what’s going to happen, though Dawn fears the worst. It begins with two women, Dawn and Cathy, in a holding cell after their shuttle is seized by off-world cyborg pirates with gunmetal-colored skin. Unfortunately the story doesn’t live up to that potential. The fact that there’s a whole society of such beings – this is the third in the author’s Cyborg Seduction series – suggested some interesting world-building as well.

You know why? Because when I read that the hero is a cyborg, I imagined mechanical body parts used in sex. When I came to write this review of Laurann Dohner’s Melting Iron, I realized that what I remember most about the reading experience is a sense of disappointment.

Melting iron laurann dohner