Review: 3 out of 5 stars - there's a spoiler included
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 9, 2014
The idea of a scientist, who is female, in a romance was my ‘gotta read this’ moment when I found about this story. Smart girls are fun because they’re usually so caught up in their own head and in their work that it leaves them socially awkward and sometimes a bit angsty about romance. Then if that’s not interesting enough, ménages are one of my favorite categories of romance/erotica, and yes I do like romance and not just sex here, there and every where. Oh, and a believable storyline is always good. See where my problem is – I’ve already got expectations. I’ve not read King’s other books in the ‘Lovers and Friends’ series but I do believe that this story is some how related to that series because Landon is Meredith’s sister. Jen wrote a review on that story, ‘Waiting for Ty’, if you want to check that out.Meredith’s story starts as it means to go on. It’s a sex scene during her college years with her then boyfriend, Dylan, and his roommate, Blaine. Everything about that scene spelled warning to me because Dylan was too excited about having a threesome with Blaine and Meredith and come to find out from Meredith’s thoughts that Dylan had been ‘prepping’ her by using a sex toy along with his male part (in her female part) when they would have sex. But I guess when you’re in love, young, stupid and in college those things don’t ring a warning bell. Is that what we’re learning about in college boys and girls? In the harsh light of morning when the goodnight has ended, Dylan doesn’t call her and she doesn’t hear from Blaine again until she accidentally runs into him, years later.Meredith plays, have always played, the ditzy blonde so she can be accepted socially and those same people that she’s trying to fit in with won’t figure out how smart she is. She’s almost 30 years old and still playing that game; how old do you have to be to find that balance between being open to meeting new people and thinking that everyone around you is too dumb to have a conversation with you unless you dummy yourself down?I didn’t like Meredith. I didn’t find anything likable about her actually. She came off as a woe is me kind of person and I don’t find passive aggressive to be an attractive trait. Everything about her including that secret that she hid not only from Blaine but from her family bothered me to no end. SPOILER ALERT. She got pregnant during the threesome with Dylan and Blaine and didn’t tell anyone other than her sister, Nikki. She then gave the baby up to a couple, Chris and Larry, in an open adoption. I think she chose a male couple because the guys would have to explain to the child who the mother is. But during 8 years of correspondence which including multiple please from the guys and the child – Meredith never responded. Why have an open adoption if you’re not going to correspond? END OF SPOILER ALERT.Charlie is a nice guy; you could say he’s a Southern gentleman, a good-ole Southern boy, or whatever brush you want to paint him in but he was too nice for Meredith. They met while she’s taking a handgun class where he’s the instructor. Meredith scopes him out as her one-night stand and the way that so called date went is the impression that I kept about her. He was open and honest and always had the best interest of both Meredith and Blaine. There was little to dislike.As it turns out Blaine is Charlie’s boss. And after a week of visiting Charlie, and Blaine by default, at the ranch, old feelings are stirred up and the sex gets ramped up to include some voyeurism. So it’s no wonder that Meredith proposes another threesome because why not, that last one worked out so well. But Blaine was there the save the day and their threesome because he seems to be the voice of reason.There’s plenty of sex. I would have given up some of the sex scenes to get more conversation and actual interaction (not sex) from these three. The relationship building didn’t start until the last quarter of the story and by then I was over learning anything about Meredith, Blaine, or Charlie. The internal dialogues were plenty and as I don’t enjoy that as much as I do spoken dialogue in stories it made the overall story come off as being just meh.Happy Reading Folks!Rating: C*ARC provided by Carina Press for reviewReview posted at www.redhotbooks(dot)com