Mimi

This book is a long one. Initially the pacing felt slow and it dragged.

When the romance progresses between Brett and Bowen about 5-10% in, I started to get into the book. Primarily I start wondering who is Brett’s baby’s father and who is present Brett’s boyfriend.

The time jumps were very confusing in this book after a while. The flashbacks were so long I had to constantly go back to check what time period we are currently in. It might have been manageable if the flashbacks stuck to chronological order 1 year in the past but we had random jumps to college, high school and all different POVs.

When Brett actually cheated on Bowen, I started disliking her. I already thought she was an idiot for approaching Colson at work despite her fearing him but it was also disrespectful to Bowen, who had expressed concerns about her spending time with him.

What made it worse is Brett didn’t even feel bad or feel bad any time she cheated. She’d go home where Bowen would drop hints he knew she was cheating, she’d admit to nothing, though apologizing to him tearfully, then next day cheat on him again with no remorse.

I understand the author justifies it later on by making Bowen a bad guy. But at this stage of the book, Colton is a guy who mistreated her after asking her out, slept with her and took her out a couple of times in college, shot her with an actual gun, ghosted her for years then suddenly reappeared in her life stalking her, breaking into her house and scaring her.

Meanwhile, Bowen was her loving partner who she lived with 24/7 for months, had great sex with, fixed all problems for her, spoiled her with gifts and loved her enough she committed to having 4 kids with him

Brett had virtually no chemistry with Colson and had barely been with him romantically in the past either. They hadn’t lived together and Brett barely knew anything about him. She didn’t even know Colson had a sister and a step sister, despite Colson still being close to his sister. I wish Bowen was the lead and not Colson. It would have made more sense and made a more interesting book.

The book completely lost me when Bowen suddenly deleted Brett’s book, claimed Barrett hit on him and locked Brett in her bedroom. All of these seemed like out of character moments to enable Colson to get back together with Brett.

Brett’s author job is work from home and would not have taken her away from him. In fact, if she got her book published, she’d quit her job and be away from Colson. It made absolutely no sense Bowen would sabotage her book.

Barrett was one of Bowen’s biggest supporters. She was gushing over Bowen’s constant willingness to help her soft her problems at home. It made no sense Bowen would want to isolate Brett from her.

Supposedly Bowen is a skilled manipulator and serial killer. However, the author tries to convince us he kept a corpse, an incriminating letter from one of his murder victims and locks of his other murder victim’s hair unlocked in his home that Brett has full access to, instead of destroying any of it. Or at the very least, locking these away? Why he’d pretend he doesn’t know an Emily made no sense either when he was open with Brett that he had an ex girlfriend who ghosted him. It seemed like another out of character moment so Brett starts to doubt Bowen.

Bowen is cunning but supposedly would lock Brett’s bedroom door, assuming it’d keep her captive. He just leaves the house without tying Brett up to ensure she can’t escape, board up with windows, take away her car, guard her himself or even have surveillance in the room to monitor his captive. It made no sense he’d make her escape so easy.

Despite knowing Brett was at her friend’s place due to GPS tracking and wanting to recapture her after her escape, he just walked away like he didn’t know she was there? He waited days later after Brett had found the GPS and left the house to send police to retrieve her. Again, made no sense because Bowen could have just sent police the day he tracked the GPS

I ended up skimming through everything after 70% and there were so many unnecessary Evie flashbacks and a weird nonsensical fantasy arc with Evie's spirit so that Colson could find Evie’s body.

I didn’t like this one overall unfortunately

The writing of this isn’t great. There are some extremely long sentences in this book that don’t make sense and are hard to follow. I also found myself not really caring about any of the characters in this.

The tropes in the first half of the book is what kept me going despite the writing. I do love a dark omegaverse with body betrayal, non con and an alpha that asserts his dominance over his omega. I ended up skimming through the text to follow the plot

The plot wasn’t great otherwise and bored me entirely in the second half. There are constant references to another woman, Moria and we have no context on who she is or what happened to her.

The cliffhanger ending was unnecessary and came out of nowhere. It completely ruined the book for me.

The smut was just OK and not spicy

Almost pure smut but the smut was forbidden and spicy.

We saw hints of breeding kink so I was disappointed we didn’t get an epilogue with kids or pregnancy. I was also a bit weirded about the mum being OK with everything and am confused how she fits in the picture now

First 20% was a good read but couldn't enjoy the plot in this so dnf

I'm really struggling to rate this 2.5 stars as “just OK” or 3 stars as “I liked this book”. The ending though was so good

I loved the romance development between Caius and Romy. I really liked the smut where Caius can't get enough of her and his jealousy over other guys salivating over her or his brother getting close to her.

The book could have been more spicier and I didn't quite like that this is another bad guy turns out of to be good stories. But I liked the relationship between Caius and Romy enough to move past this, especially with how unpredictable, engaging and intriguing (while being totally messed up) the plot is. Although there was a brief moment when Caius was fighting his attraction to Romy where I felt really bad for him and stopped rooting for him. But he redeemed himself later on.

The plot... where do I even start? I did not expect it to go in that direction. So many unexpected plot points, Bastian turning out to be a bad guy, Megan being able to escape, Theo betraying Romy, Calista not being Caius's sister at all and I probably would have stopped reading the rest of the series because I kept rooting for Caius to save Romy but he gave up on her and she went through surgery BUT that ending!!!

Omg. She got married??? And she's completely brainwashed. I figured it wasn't to Caius and I thought maybe to Theo? But no, it was to Seth!!! And she's pregnant??? A big part of me is hoping the baby is Caius's but surely that unlikely? Seth wouldn't like that would he?