I received this ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The gist: This is the conclusion to Ethan and Chloe's story. Book 1, Ruined, left off with a cliffhanger (Ethan's brother showing up on his doorstep) and if you haven't read book 1, don't bother reading book 2 because that's like starting a book in the middle. Ethan is the uber rich CEO of Frost Industries, a biomedical technologies company. Chloe is an Intellectual Property Law intern at his company. They met at work when Ethan made her a smoothie and she didn't realize who he was. They quickly started a romance. Chloe is deeply troubled because she was raped in high school and then forced to keep quiet about it. They have a turbulent relationship with all her issues and her constant running away over the slightest infraction.
I REALLY wanted to LOVE this book, but I mostly just ended up with whiplash. I FINALLY got a satisfactory conclusion to the story, the HEA, but it was hard won. There was A LOT of eye rolling on my part because Chloe is one of those incredibly annoying heroines who runs away every time Ethan doesn't tell her he took a shit. He's keeping shit from her. Blah, blah, blah. And this bitch dwells CONSTANTLY on the past. Yeah, yeah, I get it. It'd be hard being raped. It'd be hard to deal with intimacy after that. But I know rape victims (and I understand not everyone is the same) who don't live every day as though they are broken shells of humans. It's fine to give a character a rough background in order to give them depth, but MY GOD with the CONSTANT DWELLING!!! Get over it already, Bitch. And her constantly thinking Ethan is evil is ridiculous because he's done NOTHING to indicate he has a bad or malicious bone in his body. She was just ridiculous.
Ethan is great, of course. Yeah, he maybe contributed to his brother being a POS, but honestly, he was just trying to help him out. Most people would help their family members if they could, especially when they aren't being given the whole truth about a situation. When their family is playing the victim card.
Anyway, this story was A LOT of Chloe running away from Ethan and Ethan begging her to come back. A lot of Chloe SAYING she trusts Ethan when she doesn't. AT ALL. A lot of Chloe playing the victim. A lot of adults (her coworkers) calling her names and bullying her like high schoolers because she's boinking the boss. It was a lot of ridiculousness.
In true Ms. Wolff style, there was A LOT of unnecessary repetition. The book could have been AT LEAST 50 pages shorter if Chloe wasn't dwelling on her woes.
There were quite a few consistency errors from the first book and this one. The primary one being that Chloe was a redhead in Ruined, but a blonde in Addicted. She had a Mini Cooper in Ruined, but a Honda in this one. There was one part where it was suppose to be her brother's name, but it was Ethan's brother's name instead. There was one part where it talked about how she and Ethan got a medal for a sand castle they built in Ruined, but they never got a medal for the sand castle. Details like this REALLY get under my skin, because a book is an author's brain child. The author decides what their characters look like, how they act, what they drive, etc. If a detail is important enough to mention (ie the heroine's hair color), it shouldn't change from one book to the next without an explanation. They should keep character names consistent (ie her brother's name). Maybe that's too much to ask as a reader and maybe I'm just too damn neurotic, but that type of shit makes me stew and it eats at my soul. (Okay, maybe that's A BIT melodramatic...) Proofreading errors are bad enough, but there's NO excuse, in my opinion, for storyline errors/inconsistencies. Those types of mistakes will reduce a rating by a MINIMUM of one star. Constant repetition and dwelling will, too.
I did get my HEA (or rather, Ethan and Chloe did...), but it was actually wrapped up a bit too quickly and neatly. It left me feeling as though the author was at her page limit and just said, 'Well, I've written enough now so let's wrap this puppy up.' Chloe literally left him AGAIN in the next to last chapter and then they got back together in the last chapter and then the epilogue was a year later. Whiplash, anyone? I'm just glad to be finished and moving on to something else.