Series: Protecting Her #1
Publisher: Crave Publishing
Genre: Romantic Suspense/Organized Crime
~Blurb~
I don’t know how my life got so twisted.
One day, I’m working as a cash guard, shooting the tires off a stolen vehicle, and the next I’m a guard for the only daughter of high-profile mob boss, Marco Ventilli.
The twist?
I’ve already met the five-foot-four, one-hundred-and-ten-pound bombshell that is Sera Ventilli. In fact, I’ve had her every way a man can have a woman, and if her father ever finds out, he’ll skin me alive and bury me six feet under the hot sands of Las Vegas.
I knew Sera looked like the worst kind of trouble—my gut told me she was—but she swore otherwise, and I lapped up every single lie she fed me, like a Goddamn idiot.
All I had to do was keep the promise I made to my mother on her deathbed. Leave the Army, find a normal job and a good woman, and get on with my life.
Yeah. So much for that.
~Book Review~
4 Stars
Ben Campbell, 32, is a military vet who has made a deathbed promise to his mother not to reenlist. But he’s bored with other jobs until he gets himself in over his head. Sera Ventilli, 20, is feeling the oppression of being a mob boss’s daughter. She just wants to have a normal life and have some fun. But that quickly turns to chaos when her ONS becomes her bodyguard.
“‘Hold on to your heels, Princess. Shit’s about to get wild.’”
Told via their alternating first person POV, Ben and Sera are both likable characters. I particularly enjoyed how Sera is portrayed as a strong female character. She lives in a world where men call all of the shots, yet that doesn’t stop her from rebelling and resisting their sexist ideology.
“If they [men] get excited because of a tiny point in my shirt, then that says more about them than it does about me.”
That’s a sentiment that needs echoed more often in the real world too, and I connected with Sera more because of it. She knows the problem isn’t her but the society she was born into. And it doesn’t stop her from pushing back. It also made the banter between her and Ben in a sexy scene pretty fun too.
“‘You expect me to walk around with this tomorrow? In front of everyone?’‘That sounds like a Ben problem…I’d love to help, but I’m leaving.’”
This is a fairly fast paced, action-romance novella. I was disappointed in the way their first night together was broken up into flashback scenes, but the later encounter between them was hot!
The biggest drawback to the story lies in the scant resolution and rushed ending that feels unfinished. It lacks in detailed explanation of exactly how everything worked out and where it’s going from there. Since this was too long for the original intended anthology (per the blurb), I do think the author should have developed this version more once it was being released on its own. While there were missed places for development throughout, and scenes I would have liked to have read rather than have recapped, the end is the most troublesome. I’m rather confused by the blurb’s note of it being “a standalone novel with a HEA. It is book one in an interconnected novella series.” If this is meant to be a standalone, then the ending needs more work including a true epilogue.
The biggest drawback to the story lies in the scant resolution and rushed ending that feels unfinished. It lacks in detailed explanation of exactly how everything worked out and where it’s going from there. Since this was too long for the original intended anthology (per the blurb), I do think the author should have developed this version more once it was being released on its own. While there were missed places for development throughout, and scenes I would have liked to have read rather than have recapped, the end is the most troublesome. I’m rather confused by the blurb’s note of it being “a standalone novel with a HEA. It is book one in an interconnected novella series.” If this is meant to be a standalone, then the ending needs more work including a true epilogue.
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SKYLA MADI is an International bestselling romance novelist from Brisbane, Australia. Skyla started her writing career fresh out of high school and at 24 she is a giver of both real and fictional life. She is an aquarian, lover of the written word and author of the #1 BESTSELLING Consumed
trilogy.
trilogy.
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