Review: ✨A touching, tempting and dynamic read!✨
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 13, 2013
[...][...]My rating: 3.5 of 5 ⭐️Surprising her rocker husband with an early return to the tour turned out to be a bigger surprise than she had intended. If you can call catching him between another woman's thighs a surprise.Shocked, hurt, but determined not to put up with that s***, Ally finds her way to a friend's place where she slowly finds her legs again. Having had time to reflect on her marriage she faces some realities and makes some decisions, but her ex is not ready to let go and trying his best to make amends. But Ally is moving on and is building a new life, with new people. One in particular comes to mind.When his girlfriend of many years tells him she's leaving out of the blue, Nick is floored, at first. But since everyone around him seems to want to celebrate the fact she is gone, it doesn't really take that long for him to realize that she was not the best match. Of course it doesn't hurt that the new girl in town, Ally, who also happens to work for him, is turning out to be great fun to hang out with. And although neither of them are ready for more than friendship, their chemistry implies there will be much, much more to come.Ironically, it seems that the moment their connection moves beyond the boundaries of friendship, each of their past relationships are thrown up in their faces. Trying hard to let nothing touch their own fragile new bond, Nick and Ally start keeping things from each other, not wanting to burst their shiny bubble. Some secrets have more impact than others, especially since they are bound to become bigger over time. And sometimes they blow up in your face......*****I had no idea what to expect when I started reading this book and was pleasantly surprised!!!A good story, two people fresh out of their respective tough break ups, who are tempted to jump each other's bones, but decide to play it cool first.....at least for a bit. Then when they do get together the past blows up in their face. Baggage ALWAYS follows you around!!!There were a few spots in the book where I felt the timeline was a bit jerky.....there were some 'gaps' where suddenly a block of time had gone by. Usually when that happens in a story, you'll see a line that says something like.... "And for the next few weeks they did (this and that).......", and the next chapter then will pick up the time line again. It felt a bit like the opposite here, where the explanation for the interlude was at the beginning of the next time frame. It made me flip back the pages to see what I had missed.The characters were fantastic, with lots of variety and great dialogue. I managed to learn a lot from the dynamic between all of them, not just about what went on at that time, but also a little about background.Love the 'one strike you're out' attitude Ally has when it comes to cheating, especially when you deal with someone who has to be on the road all the time.....nah, no room for error there! Ally is a pretty level-headed person and I think she even surprised her family when she off and married Teddy (the rocker hubby). She isn't a planner and likes to live life as it comes. But she is by no stretch of the imagination irresponsible and when she feels, she feels deep. But she is not stupid and she knows very well how best to take care of herself and her heart.A bit of a pushover, our Nick is. In a relationship with a she-devil since teenage years will do that to ya. A solid good guy, who wants nothing but to do the right thing for everyone, but needs to learn that people have to make their own choices and their own decisions. I think he based his decisions regarding Ally on what he had learned from years of his ex. Instead of trusting in Ally, he trusted in his own skewed frame of experience and thus screwed up. Yup. Can I say 'typical'?? Or is that politically incorrect??Despite my frustration with the characters at times, the writing was solid, the story compelling and the supporting cast colourful. The fact that this was the third book in a series, but only one I've read, didn't bother me in the least. I had absolutely no problem seeing the plot against the proper layout. That is a feather in the cap of C. A. Williams, it shows she has the personalities of her cast of characters firmly in hand, since all I needed was a glimpse at them to know how to place them all in the proper context. It made ONE SIMPLE STEP as easy to read as a standalone novel for me.✨A touching, tempting and dynamic read!✨**ARC provided in return for an honest review.**