Author: Lyssa Kay Adams
Printed edition, Jove
(Book 1 of 4)
Nashville Legend’s second baseman Gavin Scott’s marriage is in trouble. You see, after 3 years of marriage to the love of his life he finds out that she has been faking it all through the marriage. Yeah, you read it right, she was faking it. And he learns that on the night he hits a legendary grand slam. Was his whole marriage “faked”? The thing is, Gavin has his insecurities. He stutters. And now apparently he can’t satisfy his wife in bed. Never could!
Thea has indeed been faking. Not only in the marriage bed, but in her life in general. She loves her husband, but they were thrown into a “shotgun wedding” when she found out she was pregnant. She had to quit school and she never fit in with the WAG crowd. She’s not happy in this marriage and coming from a broken marriage herself she doesn’t want her twin girls to go through the same things she went as a child and she decides it’s time to move on.
Desperate and broken, Gavin finds helps the most unexpected source: a secret book club made up of Nashville’s top alpha men, including some of his teammates. Yup, they read romance novels to learn how to navigate the waters of relationships and to understand the female mind. He’s desperate, so he has nothing to lose! Their current book club selection, Courting the Countess, becomes a manual for the poor guy to summon his inner hero and sweep his wife off her feet again.
I really had a great time reading this book and it is a 5 star read, but I had two things that rubbed me the wrong way:
Miscommunication – yup, Thea’s still young and she was thrown into a marriage with two kids and she saw her dreams come to a halt. But from the glimpses we see from what their marriage was before The Big OH NO and from what she tells Gavin, she never said anything about being unhappy. It was , to me, a 0 to 60 situation that she threw on his head. She reveals the “big fake”, throws him out and says she wants a divorce. I really don’t enjoy these plots when a simple conversation would have solved, if not everything, all the minor stuff. I also understand that she comes with a baggage of abandonment, which is why I sill like the character. But yeah, it irks me. You see, she was right to feel this way. That’s not the point. I just wish she had told him! And c’mon, Gavin, you couldn’t have been that clueless!
And… what the freaking fuck is Liv???? OMG, I wanted to jump into the book and slap her silly. She might say that all that obnoxiousness is because she has her sister’s back, but she comes off as a spoiled, selfish little woman who doesn’t want her sister to find her happiness because it suits her emotional needs now that she sees them as a “team” again. In the end, even Thea called her out on it because it was just getting infuriating. I see that she is the heroine in the next book in the series and she is going have to face Mack… That should be interesting.
Again, I did have a great time reading this book. I read it in one sitting! I laughed out loud with all the alternative names Gavin comes up with for the Duke in the romance novel they are reading! LOL
Possible triggers: stuttering, feelings of abandonment
