Rachel is a sensible, modest librarian by day but earns extra money at night by becoming “Velvet” for a 1-900 sex line.  Richard calls the line out of curiosity one evening, and falls for her sultry voice while recognizing her innate submissive nature.  Pushing her past her boundaries with each call, the stakes rise for both of them until she must decide if she is ready to dare reconcile her reality to her fantasy.

I love a good transformation theme, especially the mousy librarian who blooms into a hothouse flower.  Ms. Thompson also offers the reader a really fascinating power exchange between Rachel and Richard, and I liked how we are able to see how Rachel comes to each decision to proceed to the next step.

Rachel is modest, shy, mousy and generally accepting in her realization that life is passing her by.  Her back story also provided insight to her modesty—which is then slowly stripped away by Richard. However, I was not able to reconcile that Rachel with the Rachel from the first scene-who was not modest at all with her sex chat customer.  It made it a little less believable that she would be shy or embarrassed when Richard gave her some of the assignments.  That sort of discrepancy niggled at the back of my mind and took me out of the story a time or two.

I did enjoy the story.  I really liked that no matter how scared Rachel felt, she felt safe at the same time, and that Richard knew his sub was also someone he would cherish and feel great responsibility toward.  Sometimes that is missed in this genre—the two-way street factor of the Dom/sub relationship.  I found this story psychologically satisfying and the characters compelling.

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