Ashley fan

absolutely fantastic aubile.we need more colorado mountain men Chaos we need tack Allen motel cycle man mystery man come on get them all out there!!@@@@

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My favourite in the series

Gosh I love this book. The normal elements that make me like KA books so much. She is pure sunshine ☀️ he is grumpy 😠 all alpha and rude as…. This is slow burn, it takes them 7 YEARS to close the deal, but it feels like 1 million years. I really didn’t like the slow burn here. It was torture.
Their relationship is funny. And when the spicy parts happen, it was hot 🥵.
Narration needed a male voice as well, but Stella Bloom’s narration was just amazing (as always).

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Deacon Deacon! You'll love this book

Another fabulous story from KA. If your a fan and haven't read this book yet, what are you waiting for!! I love the rock chick series and absolutely love this unfinished hero one too. Make sure you also read Knight it's the first in this series and another of my favs from it.

The plot.. Cassidy is build her dream in the Colorado mountains. Her boyfriend is a looser and gets ditched not long into the book. John Priest is a quiet brooding man who stays at cabin 11. He's lips twitch and he does not like cookies but Cassidy is harbouring a big crush on him. Thoroughly great read. Highly recommend.

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love it.

what a beautiful and sexy story. Love the heroine and the alpha. Best book for entertainment! knight from the same series is also great.

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Shallow

This was a sale book and so I went for it. You can often hit gold when you pick randomly. But the moving towards risqué soft porn genre with no depth of characterisation or decent back story was frustrating and every time they had sex I was willing them to hurry up. The performance could have done with a male voice as narrating a husky 'badass' man didn't work. Would have been better perhaps if I read the book rather than listened. Won't get any more Kristen Ashley books again, my intellect couldn't take the beating.

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Not one of KA's best

I hate to criticise a Kristen Ashley book because some of her books are so good I have read them over and over again. But this one disappoints. The first half of this book is pure 5* Kristen Ashley, the second half, not so much.

This was a real slow burn romance – super slow. The h owns and runs some mountain cabins, and the H turns up now and then to stay – under an assumed name and paying cash. The h is sunny, friendly and pretty much an emotional open book. The H is unemotional, uninvolved and totally “closed down” emotionally.

I loved the unusual development of this romance. The h realised immediately that the H had problems with emotional attachment and, apart from an early attempt to start something (she turns up at his cabin with a slice of pie, he tells her to “go home” and slams the door in her face!) she pretty much lets him come and go without trying to push for more contact.

Another aspect I particularly loved, was than in the years of their occasional contact, the h did not stay home pining for someone she couldn’t have. She had a full and busy life, she dated, had sex, and made friends. In a wonderful departure from the “norm” it is the H who loses interest in all other women once he meets the h and, even though he makes no attempt at a relationship with her, does not get involved with anyone else. It takes an incident with unruly guests to break him out of his emotional “lock down” and things between the couple progress from there.

The middle of the book did seem to drag a bit. Endless fabulous sex does get boring to read about. There were also too many domestic squabbles about money matters. This often happens in KA books and I can see the relevance of a woman wanting to “pay her share”. However in this case the H was staying in the home belonging to the h, she was paying the household bills, was still in debt and working hard to keep her business afloat. So her continuous arguments with the H who wanted to contribute in some way just seemed a bit illogical. Would she have been happier if he just freeloaded?

The sex then goes into BDSM territory and that’s where I really lost interest. I fast-forwarded through entire chapters of sex. I have read and loved BDSM books in the past but they are a very particular niche market and here it did not work for me. Firstly, it annoyed me that a sensible, intelligent woman was portrayed as ashamed of her wish to explore this type of sex, But mainly because I felt a bit cheated to have any pretence at a storyline replaced with endless pages of graphically described sex.

It was, however, the final chapters in this book that knocked it from 5* to 2* for me. The h discovers an incriminating photo and, ignoring seven years of emotional knowledge of the H, jumps to the obviously wrong conclusion. The H could, of course, have cleared up this issue with one simple sentence of explanation but no, he refused to explain and left. He returns six months later (yeah, six months!) to fix the relationship not with an in-depth discussion, apology and explanation, but by a marathon BDSM sex session that was just weird, both in content and timing. In fact the extent of the H’s apology for six months absence is pretty much “listen to this song, then meet me in the bedroom.” Unfortunately I had stopped liking him by this stage, because when I found the reason for him going ‘off the grid’ I was just bemused. What happened to him was pretty awful, but his complete emotional shutdown seemed totally out of proportion to the facts. I like my H’s to have more of a backbone against the hard knocks of life and I thought his total withdrawal from normal life was just a bit selfish, because in doing so, he walked away from friends who cared about him and family who loved him. He let them spend ten years worrying, not knowing if he was alive or dead. For that alone, this H does not work for me. I will let other readers discuss the butt plugs …….!

In summary, I am starting to agree with other readers that KA books have changed significantly since her earlier works. Maybe publishing deadlines mean that she does not have the time to refine her books, or maybe it is pressure to appeal to a certain demographic (BDSM being the current trend). Maybe, as readers, we are just so in love with some of her earlier books that our expectations are unreasonably high? I have also knocked a star off the narration. The voice of the narrator just does not gel with me. Her portrayal of KA's men is pretty good, but somehow she makes the female characters sound very immature, and ever so slightly irritating.

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