Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genre: contemporary romance
Series: Hurley Boys #2
Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Harlequin HQN
Date Released: December 1, 2014
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

Beyond passion. And beyond their control…

Five years ago, Tuesday Eastwood’s life collapsed and left her devastated. After an empty, nomadic existence, she’s finally pieced her life back together in the small Oregon town of Hood River. Now Tuesday has everything sorted out. Just so long as men are kept for sex, and only sex…

Then she met him.

Musician and rancher Ezra Hurley isn’t the man of Tuesday’s dreams. He’s a verboten fantasy—a man tortured by past addictions whose dark charisma and long, lean body promise delicious carnality. But this craving goes far beyond chemistry. It’s primal. It’s insatiable. And it won’t be satisfied until they’re both consumed, body and soul…

My Review:

I read Broken Open immediately after I finished The Best Kind of Trouble (reviewed here), and I have to say that I liked Open much better than Trouble. The crisis in both stories is precipitated by the guy acting like an idiot, but Ezra’s brand of idiocy in Open felt more organic to the character as he had been through the whole book. Paddy’s moment of complete WTF’ery in Trouble came out of left field (far left field) for this reader, but Ezra had been cruising for that particular brand of bruising throughout the book.

The relationship between Ezra Hurley and Tuesday Eastwood (nee Easton) begins in Trouble. When they meet, everyone can see the heat between them, including Ezra’s brother Paddy and Tuesday’s best-friend and sister-from-another-mother Natalie Clayton. It’s only a matter of time until these two get together.

Tuesday and Ezra are both equally wounded, and their very different wounds were inflicted at the same time. Five years ago, Tuesday lost her young husband to cancer. It’s taken all of those intervening five years to grieve, let go and start moving forward with her life.

Tuesday is not moving “on”. A part of her will always love the late and much-lamented Eric, but she’s still alive and starting to live again. Her late/ex in-laws are abusive pieces of work who want to hold her back for their own emotional gratification, and Tuesday is still in the process of kicking them to the curb. But her life continues, and the new, strong Tuesday is ready to make some changes.

Five years ago, Ezra was a rock and roll star on the road with his brothers, in their successful band Sweet Hollow Ranch. Then Ezra descended into heroin addiction and nearly pissed it all away. A year as an addict, a year in rehab and sober living, and the last few years producing the group’s music and otherwise sticking close to his family ranch. Running the ranch grounds him, and he needs that. Possibly he always will.

But Ezra and Tuesday are both ready to reach out for more than just a series of one-night stands. For both of them, their relationship is a second chance at life, not just love. The longer and hotter they burn for each other, the more they also get entwined in each other’s lives.

It’s not just sex, not that the sex isn’t fantastic. But Ezra and Tuesday fit each other’s broken places in a way that just works.

The problem is that while Tuesday has found happiness and healing in her growing relationship with Ezra, Ezra fears that he is substituting one addiction for another. He keeps walling himself away, fully convinced that Tuesday can do much, much better than a recovering addict and ex-rock star.

Tuesday finally has to tell him to either get over his shit and forgive himself, or just plain go so she can’t get over him. And just like his brother Paddy, Ezra very nearly blows his best chance at happiness by not getting out of his own way.

Escape Rating B+: A part of me wants to say that this is a “sex into love” story, but that isn’t quite right. Although Ezra and Tuesday’s relationship starts out with a lot of hot sex, that isn’t what really begins things. They have explosive chemistry from their very first meeting, and for a while they both resist it for very different reasons. At the same time, they keep running into each other because his brother is in a relationship with her BFF/house mate. They can’t avoid each other.

They are both realistically gun-shy of a relationship. Tuesday’s not sure she’s ready to open her heart again, and Ezra doesn’t think he deserves to be happy. So they ease into it slowly, using hot sex as a kind of emotional lubricant. Eventually they find themselves in so deep that there is no option but to admit that they love each other.

But while Tuesday has reached a place of healing where she is sure what she wants, Ezra backslides. He has a definite problem finding the line between doing things that feel good and doing things that feel too good. It’s part of how he got hooked. He’s afraid, realistically so, that he might have substituted an addiction to Tuesday for his addiction to heroin.

He also thinks he’ll be making up for his horrible mistakes to his family for the rest of his life. He doesn’t see, or can’t see, that he really has redeemed himself in their eyes. He feels as if his actions were unforgivable. But he is so unlike Natalie’s dad in Trouble. Her father is an addict who never sincerely owns his own actions, so he can’t get out of the trap of addiction.

Ezra maybe owns his actions a bit too much. He also, like Tuesday, needs to move forward from his past.

Ezra is very firmly in the mold of romance heroes who decide for their heroines that the woman can do much better than himself, and tries to asshole his way out of the picture. Of course it doesn’t work. Tuesday calls him on his shit. She knows she will survive if he leaves, but she’d rather he crowbar his head out of his ass and move forward with her. But she is willing to walk away if he won’t, and that felt right.

Part of the crisis in this story revolves around the parents of Tuesday’s late husband. They are slime. They alienated Eric while he was alive, and now want Tuesday to wallow in guilt because he’s dead. There is also a big dose of racism in their hatred of Tuesday. It was marvelous watching her stand up to them, and Tuesday’s mother reveals herself as a kick-ass heroine in her own right. Every daughter should have a mother like Diana Easton in her corner.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Series: Hurley Boys #1
Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Harlequin HQN
Date Released: August 26, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

She has complete control… and he’s determined to take it away

A librarian in the small town of Hood River, Natalie Clayton’s world is very nearly perfect. After a turbulent childhood and her once-wild ways, life is now under control. But trouble has a way of turning up unexpectedly—especially in the tall, charismatically sexy form of Paddy Hurley….

And Paddy is the kind of trouble that Natalie has a taste for.

Even after years of the rock and roll lifestyle, Paddy never forgot the two wickedly hot weeks he once shared with Natalie. Now he wants more… even if it means tempting Natalie and her iron-grip control. But there’s a fine line between well-behaved and misbehaved—and the only compromise is between the sheets!

My Review:

I love the idea of a librarian as the heroine of a romance. There has always been way more going on in the stacks than our image in the public consciousness would lead one to believe.

I also love the idea of a rock star romance. It is possibly everyone’s fantasy at some point in their lives to get swept away into the glittering world of the rich, famous and supremely talented. While it may not be a good idea in real life, as a fantasy, it definitely works.

And parts of The Best Kind of Trouble worked really well, while other parts fell a little flat.

The story also reminded me an awful lot of Rock Addiction by Nalini Singh (reviewed here). This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Both stories feature the same type of characters, a librarian with tons of control issues because of serious shit in her past, and a rock star who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to starting a relationship in spite of two sets of very heavy baggage.

About The Best Kind of Trouble…this is the first book in Dane’s Hurley Boys series, and it is pretty obvious from the beginning that every one of the brothers is going to get their HEA by series end. It helps that they already have two fine examples in their midst. Their parents’ marriage is rock solid and clearly a strong love match, but one of the four brothers, Damien, has already found his Ms. Right and married her.

Mary Hurley has become the center of the new family dynamic that the brothers are creating. I was about to say that I wish we had their story, but we do. It’s Lush, book 3 of Dane’s Delicious series. Oh well, throw another book on the towering TBR pile.

Dragging myself back to The Best Kind of Trouble. Again.

This is a second chance at love story, and it looks like the rest of the series will be also, for various definitions of second chances. In the case of Patrick (Paddy) Hurley and Natalie Clayton, when they run into each other in a coffee shop in Hood River, it isn’t the first time they met.

Way back when, when the band was still playing dive bars and Natalie was still in high school, they spent two torrid weeks together. They were both underage, and they were both so hot for each other that they couldn’t keep away.

That was a long time ago. Natalie got her act together and finished high school, college and graduate school while ditching her wild party ways and wild party days. She got control of her life and she wants to keep it that way.

The Hurley Brothers band made it big. They’re all rock stars and they’re all filthy rich. They’ve also learned the high cost of fame and fortune, and when they are home in Hood River, they help their parents run the ranch.

Paddy wants to see if he and Natalie can have more between them than just their still smoking hot chemistry. Natalie isn’t sure whether she wants to be anywhere near Paddy’s wild and crazy rock and roll life, but she still wants to be with him.

And they both have all too many buttons to push when it comes to fame, fortune, and the high cost of being famous. Whether they can manage to work around each other’s scar tissue is a question that only time and working on their relationship every day has a chance of solving.

Until all the shit hits all the fans and Paddy throws away the best thing he ever had. Even his famous charm may not be enough to help him get out of the huge hole he’s dug himself into. And maybe it shouldn’t.

Escape Rating B: Having read both Rock Addiction and The Best Kind of Trouble, it is hard for me not to compare the two. That being said, in reality the one had nothing to do with the other, the two books were published within two weeks of each other last fall, and they couldn’t have influenced each other directly.

But they are similar in an awful lot of ways, to the point where as I read Trouble I kept thinking about Addiction.

Also, The Hurley Brothers series is clearly a spinoff of both Dane’s Brown Family series and her Delicious series. I haven’t read either of those (yet!) but the references to previous events are mostly minor. It didn’t feel necessary to have read them to enjoy The Best Kind of Trouble.

The romance between Natalie and Paddy burns very, very hot. Natalie may seem buttoned up on the outside, but her wild side is still very much alive in her private moments. It’s just that she has reached a point in her life where she needs to keep her private stuff very private, including all the bad crap in her psyche about her addict-father, her runaway mother and her cold and emotionally manipulative grandmother.

Natalie is a classic poor little rich girl. She inherited a trust fund, but she raised herself in well-to-do-suburb where her house was filled with her dad’s addict friends and there was always puke on the floor and the furniture had all been sold to pay for drugs. He’s been in, and dropped out, of the 12-step program so many times that Natalie no longer believes his amends, especially since they are always half-assed in the first place.

She’s cut off her birth family as much as she can. Her real family are her college friends, especially the absolutely awesome Tuesday Eastwood. (I’m so happy that Tuesday got her own book, Broken Open, because she so deserves it).

Natalie has a lot of bad baggage, and Paddy keeps tripping over it. The development of their relationship hinges on her learning to tell him when something feels wrong instead of just running away. But Natalie is very big on handling her own bad stuff, even if she can’t handle it alone.

The crisis in the story hinges on a huge misunderstandammit. It also involves Natalie’s horrible family. But it isn’t Natalie who goes off the rails, it’s Paddy. And the way he explodes doesn’t really make much sense in context. He acts like an asshole and tells Natalie to leave. She tries to discuss the problem with him and he turns away. Then she leaves.

I felt for her and also felt like she did the right thing. Staying and begging for scraps of attention and understanding in those circumstances felt wrong. Natalie is good, sometimes too good, at owning her shit. In this case, her best option was to own it and take it home with her. Which she does.

Eventually Paddy figures out just how big an ass he’s been, and starts groveling. I’m glad they found their HEA but still not sure Natalie made him grovel nearly enough.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.