Review: Love, love Katy
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 13, 2014
I suspect that Archer Brooks is going to be a popular guy. As much as I hate the term and wish it would disappear from the vocabularies of all women over the age of twenty, I also suspect he’ll be riding high on a lot of book boyfriend lists. Quite simply, the man checks all the alpha boxes. He’s got sex appeal and swagger in spades, he’s got an air of mystery about him and he sets his eyes on what he wants and goes after it with every weapon in his rather vast arsenal. I could wax poetic about his skill with the dirty talk and his expertise in laying the pipe, but that would be fairly predictable. Y’all should’ve figured out by now that I’m nothing if not contrary. . . . . and that heroes are not what draws me to a story.Several weeks back, we devoted an entire podcast to the topic of kickass heroines and one of the issues we addressed was how women respond to heartbreak. While we’d never criticize anyone for how they chose to deal with their pain, it was the Nerd Herd’s general consensus that a woman who can continues to make herself vulnerable after having a man (or men, as the case may be) run roughshod over her emotions is clearly stronger than those who respond by becoming ballbusters. This was what drew me to Katy Vaughn, a woman who’s been jerked around by almost every man in her life, from her judgmental father to the boyfriend who screwed the town trollop in their bed. If there was ever a woman with reason to become a man-hating witch and develop some impenetrable armor, it’s Katy—but she doesn’t. Despite the fact that love has kicked her in the teeth more than once, she opens her heart to Archer Brooks, a man who’s made it crystal clear that there's only part of him he's interested in giving.Katy is the local preacher’s daughter and, while she might fight Daddy on the finer points of faith, one of the lessons that stuck was the mutual exclusivity of sex and love. Katy is not a one-night stand kinda girl and she’s uninterested in being a man’s plaything. Is she sexually attracted to Archer? Uh—yeah. There are times when the sexual tension between these two fair to smolders right off the page. For Katy, though, their attraction is far more than physical. From almost the moment they met—even when she was involved with someone else—Katy has been in love with Archer. She’s willing to set aside her concerns about sleeping with her boss, overlook his track record when it comes to women and take a chance on getting her heart broken again, but she won’t accept a purely physical relationship with him—“Let me in. That’s all I’m asking. I want all of you, Archer, not bits and pieces.”Y’all have to give it to the girl. Archer did NOT make it easy for her, what with the near constant stream of naughty little nothings in her ear and all those “accidental” brushes and sliding his hands all over her whenever the notion struck, but she held firm—until she just couldn’t anymore.What can I say? She loves him and loves makes women do crazy stuff.There was a period very early in the book when Archer was ranking fairly high on my A------ Heroes list. To be frank, he came off like a petulant, entitled teenage boy trying to pressure his virgin girlfriend into sex. It didn’t take long to figure out that our hero is battling some serious emotional demons, though. I can’t give you much without giving away the story, but I’ll tell you that something beautiful between two people who should love and trust one another above all else was twisted and corrupted in the interest of money. Only one thing that could screw a man up like that, ladies, and Archer uses those ghosts to fight the feelings he has for Katy. He’s fully aware of how Katy feels about him and he understands that giving in to him would devastate her–“Her eyes told me this would cost her far more than I would ever understand. I was too damn selfish to care. All I wanted was her, and I would do whatever I could to have her.Hearts be damned.”If it weren’t for the fact that there was a whole lot of love hiding under all that bull, I’d have a difficult time forgiving that. He’s incredibly bossy, generally ill-tempered and terribly proprietary, but, when all is said and done, he’s willing to let go of the baggage he’s been carting around for years to be with Katy–"I need you. More than anything else in my life, I only need you.”Want is easy. Love is tougher. I think we’ll agree, though, that NEED is a pretty serious declaration from a man whose heart has been decimated once before, yes?