I'm not sure how I feel about this book. Emily, the heroine, is definitely complex and flawed. Reeve, the love interest, is hard to like. Their relationship begins with lies and continues with more lies, but somehow they fit each other and start to fall in love.
Emily's only other love, her best friend Amber, has disappeared. She is present in the book even though she's never shown. Everything Emily does is in service to finding/saving her friend.

The characters and their journey fascinated me. I wanted to know how Emily became how she is, and how her relationship with Amber began and ended. I wanted all the characters to get what they wanted, but mostly Emily.

The sex scenes were violent and graphic and scary and also hot, which disturbed me. ( )

63 pages does not a book make! This book was free to hook the reader. It was decent enough but I'm just not hooked. Now, I don't trust the next book will be a "full" book. It was ridiculous to release a teaser. I'm thinking at this point, I just don't care if she finds Amber. ( )

Emily Wayborn hasn’t heard from her former best friend Amber in seven years. But Emily knows that something is wrong when she gets a message from Amber with the safe word that they agreed on years ago when they both were young and carefree. But Emily manages to change her life and is now she is a (voice)actress in a famous tv-series. But, she has never forgotten Amber and what happened that led to them separating ways. The trail for Amber led Emily to the mysterious billionaire Reeve Sallis. Reeve’s is known for his bad boy reputation and one of his girlfriends died mysteriously a couple of years ago. Emily decided to seduce Reeves to find out where Amber is, but she had never thought that this could be the man she would lose her heart too.

This book started off interesting with Emily purposefully going after Reeves to try to find her best friend. At the beginning, nut much is known about either Emily or Amber. But, slowly the past is revealed throughout the book.

I thought that the hunt for Amber and the past story and the events that led to their separation seven years ago was the best part of the book. Emily and Amber both when they were young lived off rich men by offering sex in exchange for a good life still. But, they were also very different with Emily into more submissive sex. In the end, it just went very bad for Emily and she managed to pull her life together and move on and now has a role in a TV-series. That is until Amber gets in touch with her again.

The book has a lot of sex scenes. If you are into that then I think that this book would probably rock your boat. Personally, I just find that the story gets lost in all the sex. And, that is too bad because the story isn’t that bad, I found the story intriguing and I wanted to know what had happened to Amber.

But Emily's search for Amber just feels like a second thing when she and Reeves finally hook up. For me, the book would have been better if the sex had been toned down and the real story had a more central place. I think this book probably would be better for someone that wants to read about submissive sex and quite a lot of that. It’s just not what I’m interesting in.

Then we have the ending. As I pointed out the sex scenes in this book are what in the end failed to make this a book that I really liked. But, I did enjoy the story and the ending, ah the ending, left me with a need to read more. True, it was not an entirely surprising ending, but it was such a perfect ending and left me yearning to read more.

I recommend this book to anyone that likes an erotic suspenseful story!

2.5 stars

I want to thank the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this book! ( )

Emily Wayborn had survived a life of depravity to find a job as a voice actress and live without help from anyone, but when her estranged best friend, Amber, leaves a message on Emily's mother's answering machine, she uses the phase that she and Emily had come up with to indicate trouble - blue raincoat. After the police are no help in finding Amber, she hires a private detective and begins an investigation into the last man that Amber had been with, Reeve Sallis - multimillionaire with ties to organized crime. Her search for clues leads her into a personal relationship with Reeve, during which she can't decide if she has found her match or if he really is a kidnapper and possibly a murderer.
First Touch is a very tense, erotic thriller with twists and turns, making it difficult to sort out the villains from the victims. Emily is a difficult character to truly like due to the fact that she has made horrible decisions in her past that have led her into dangerous situations like the one in which she currently finds herself. It's clear that Reeve is purposely an ambiguous character because he is the prime suspect, but there are other characters in the story too that could very well be the culprit. Overall, this is a very fast-paced, intricately developed story, and I'm anxious to read the conclusion in Last Touch. ( )

The first installment in Laurelin Paige's First and Last duology, First Touch is a sexually explicit and boundary pushing exploration of lead protagonist Emily Wayborn's long dormant submissive desires.

Emily Wayborn's friendship with Amber Pries ended six years earlier but when she receives a message in which Amber uses their distress signal, Emily drops everything to look into her disappearance. Although she hires a private investigator to help find Amber, Emily begins her own investigation which leads straight to Amber's former lover, wealthy resort owner Reeve Sallis. Despite the sinister rumors swirling around Reeve, he immediately awakens the dark and dangerous urges that Emily has tried to ignore and her investigation into Amber's disappearance soon takes a backseat to her progressively dangerous and erotically charged sexual encounters with Reeve.

At first, Emily seems like a self-confident and self-assured woman who is comfortable with her sexuality. Since hitting rock bottom six years earlier, her acting career has taken off and she has a starring role in a popular sitcom. Mainly concentrating on her career, Emily no longer craves or desires the types of relationships she was in during her friendship with Amber. But right from her first meeting with Reeve, she easily slips back into the habit of using her generously endowed curves to garner his attention. Once she captures his interest, she finds herself fully captivated by his need to take control and she soon becomes needy, jealous and insecure and it is rather troubling how easily Emily capitulates to his destructive dominance both in and out of the bedroom.

Reeve is the typical bad boy billionaire with a dark and mysterious past. There is little factual information available about him or his family but rumor, innuendo and gossip fill in some of the blanks. Reeve is domineering, controlling and possessive and he makes no effort to hide these aspects of his personality. These very traits appeal to Emily's need to submit but even she is ill-prepared for the heavy kink that he introduces to their sexual encounters.

Emily's quest to find Amber is quickly lost in her increasingly dangerous and toxic relationship with Reeve. He demands complete control of their sex life and her consent becomes dubious since she is such a people pleaser and so submissive that she has refuses to say no to anything he asks of her. There are no safe words and absolutely nothing is off limits. Their relationship is purely sexual and neither of them make any attempt to disguise this fact. The sexual element of the storyline is sometimes unsettling as their explorations delve into the darker side of dominant/submissive erotica and their encounters are sometimes disturbing.

While Emily's investigation into Amber's disappearance is mainly overshadowed by her disquieting relationship with Reeve, she does make a few half-hearted attempts to find out what happened to her friend. However, for the most part, Emily uses her "investigation" as an excuse to continue seeing Reeve and her continued efforts to investigate seem a little ridiculous under the circumstances. Emily is eventually so blinded by lust and desire that she makes foolhardy decisions that could literally jeopardize her life.

This first installment in Laurelin Paige's First and Last series is a well-written, highly erotic novel that is not for the sexually faint of heart. While not much progress is made in learning the truth about what happened to Amber, First Touch ends with a shocking cliffhanger that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the release of final book in this two book series. ( )