This read like a 3rd or 4th draft, not a final finished piece.
The so called ‘steamy’ parts were either boring, gross or over explained that it made it easier to skip. In fact skipping these massive story chunks made no difference in the story itself. Which is a massive red flag for storytelling.
If you can cut something and it still makes perfect sense then what was cut is useless fluff. Only add in what’s needed to tell the story, and the sex was not needed mostly because none the the characters had any chemistry. In fact they lacked any compatibility and it made it painful to read.
ALL of the characters were flat and boring making me wonder why I should care at all for them, which again is a bad tell of poor story telling. The relationships were also boring, flat and incapable of actually functioning. Literally all we saw them do was talk in a way NO HUMAN BEING would (the therapy session at the end was especially painful every other question she asked was “and how did that make you feel?” Therapists don’t actually ask that, they get you to open up by talking casually but professionally Amber’s answers were equally robotic and cringe), including weird questions asked during the ‘dates’ you could tell the author only tried to shoehorn in in order to attempt to make the characters appear more nuanced than they actually were, and have gross-me-out sex.
Really to me it felt like this was two completely different stories smashed together to make one and it did NOT work on any level.
The ending especially seemed rushed like the author didn’t actually have a plan or even cared that the main plot in the story didn’t flow or make much sense. The perpetrator was easy to guess and was fairly well foreshadowed, but there was little in the way of complex storytelling. It was all a rush just to get to the relationship part of the story. This made the imbalance and Frankenstein nature of the story VERY obvious.
And there was the issue of certain plot points being completely dropped like dealing with the brothers death and her cold mother issues though these were quickly resolved at the end in a very weird way. They were mentioned enough but seemed to be a moot point after a while like they weren’t integral to the plot… which they actually kind of were, *sarcastically* but hey it would be weird and awkward to have a woman still grieving her brothers MURDER to fall into bed with the paramedic that found him and the cop investigating his death so why not just distance yourself from it so they can all have sex. *end sarcasm*
People also seemed to just get over their trauma at the drop of a hat and injuries seemed to be so much less severe than they would otherwise be. I mean being released from the hospital the very next day after having a bullet wound in your arm? I think not, unless America is WAY more lax then everywhere else? And the fact that Amber went home at all when her house was a CRIME SCENE the day before…? What!?
And the tack on at the end with the mother? Again Huh?
Amber was an overly whiney wimp which seemed weird considering her health care role, a role in which she would see people dying everyday and is always in need of a cool head and problem solving skills. Not to mention people skills. She seemed to have very little in the way of charm that most nurses have with people. She also seemed to breakdown every other scene and was always in need to a shoulder to cry on. The girl needed therapy not two hot studs to fuck.
And Cade and Stone’s overly hyper masculine descriptions annoyed the hell out of me. “They were real manly men” is a toxic way to still be describing male main characters. It makes them 2-dimensional faceless drones the reader can just graft whatever hot person they like onto. They also both had massive hero complexes and always seemed to flip flop between hyper masculine, sensitive poet and over sexed Dom. It was confusing and annoying, again leaning into the patch worked feel of the book.
I know this is designed to be a fantasy, but it read like an identity crisis that had boring characters I honestly would never root for because they were too ‘perfect’ or too cliched.