Blame It on the Rum

DNF @ 26%

I wanted to like this. I’m into size difference (small woman, burly man in this case) and I’m a sucker for smut and/or romance where one of the partners is deeply protective of the other. Unfortunately, I don’t care for insta-love to the degree present in this book and I generally want plots to make sense.

Betty, the main female character, is the aspiring screenwriter child of a world-famous actor and his supermodel wife. She’s 21, but her parents are still suffocating her by trying to force her to use a bodyguard and sneaking a tracker into her car. Hayes is a bouncer who instantly becomes infatuated with Betty when he lets her into the bar where he works… and the proceeds to seek her out and take her home with him. It sounds creepy, even though he doesn’t take advantage of her.

And here’s where I feel conflicted on this one. I was willing to overlook the insta-love and Mary Sue character for the appeal of a big, burly protector who’s actually quite soft-hearted and not a creep. I was willing to roll with it and see where things went out of curiosity and hope it would end up being a cute romance or steamy erotica (or both).

Then Hayes drove Betty - still so drunk and/or hungover she kept swaying on her feet - to her car. Where her parents were waiting, having stalked her with a tracking chip. And these psychotically overbearing parents… decided to let her drive home. Then they decided that the man they don’t know should be hired immediately as her bodyguard, because he seems to like her. They hire him because he’s already part of her life now and therefore she won’t know they hired a bodyguard without her consent. Immediately, Hayes ponders marrying this woman he just met and taking the secret of this job to his grave.

My brain hurts just trying to explain the dumb plot progression and why I didn’t like it. So just suffice to say that the lack of logic in an already flimsy plot was the straw that broke a very exhausted camel’s back.