Yet another random buy from All Romance Ebooks in my search for bi-menage stories. I was a little hesitant about this one since it was the third in a series and I hadn't read the first two books. Turned out, maybe my hesitancy was warranted.
Series Note:
Third book in the "Three of a Kind" series about a group of poker buddies and the threesome relationships they form.
Summary:
For the last couple years, Trevor Greenfield and Max Ashberg have been involved in a secret post-poker Friday night relationship. Secretly, both have been wondering about making the relationship more committed and long-term. But in the mean time, while Max is out of the country on business, Trevor has taken in a roommate, the cousin of a poker buddy.
Grace is new to Sydney from a small town, and conservative parents. Since moving in, she's been strongly attracted to Trevor and is surprised when he's attracted to her as well. They start something one night and hope to continue it, but when Grace returns home, she's stunned to find Trev in bed with someone else. And not just any someone else, but a MALE someone else.
Trevor wants to bring Grace into his relationship with Max, but Max is at first wary. He comes around though after meeting Grace. Only problem? The moral beliefs pushed on Grace by her parents. They will have to work on Grace to convince her what they can have is right.
Review:
I bought this book even though it was the third in a series that I hadn't read the first two books of. The summary seemed like I would be okay jumping in on the third book. I may have been wrong about that. Or it could just be that author had some issues in introducing the story.
Because my biggest issue with the book was that I felt like I was jumping into it in the middle of events already going on. Instead of feeling like you are starting at chapter 1, it feels more like you are coming at chapter 2 or 3. I felt like I was dumped in the middle of a situation with established characters and situation. And I never really felt like I caught up at any point throughout the story.
I'm not sure where the fault for that lies. It is either because this is the third book in the series and there's a bit of establishing the characters and story in the previous books, or the author just did a poor job of bringing the readers into the story. I'm leaning more toward the latter just from some things in the book. It made me feel like the story was more independent from the other two books. Either way, I ended up just feeling a bit disconnected from the story.
It didn't help that this was yet another shorter ebook that didn't do a very good job of establishing character portraits (i.e. giving the readers a full idea of who these characters are). I just wanted to more about the characters as individuals to understand who they were. I wanted to know more about how Max and Trev met, how things went between them, why they kept it casual, why they kept it secret from their friends when those friends would most definitely understand, had Max been with a woman before, etc etc. And there were things about Grace's character that don't make sense. There's one line where she's going out on a blind date and says something about maybe being out all night with her date (i.e. sleeping with him) but then later she's all obsessed about the morals her parents instilled in her which don't fit with a woman who'd sleep with a guy on a first day. Basically, there just could have been a lot more character development.
On the plus side, there were some super-duper hot sex scenes in the book. And I mean scorching hot. Maybe some of the best I've read. Which made some of the other faults of the book not seem quite so bad ;)
I may consider going back and reading the first two books in the series to see if I did miss anything associated with this book. And hey, they are menage books, so I'd at least like them on that level ;)
WARNING, this book contains: explicit sex and language, m/m, m/f, m/f/m, bi-menage HEA, oral, anal, slight D/s vibe