Summary
You don’t really know a guy until you’ve vacationed with him…
When Drew Wilson’s ex-boyfriend Joel “Six” Bailey asks her to go on his family trip to Hawaii with him just as her life is falling apart, she decides it’s the perfect time to give him another chance.
The hitch? The Bailey family includes Six’s rude older brother, Joshua—a hot-nerd doctor who has hated Drew since the moment they met and once suggested she’d steal the family silver.
Drew is determined to win the Baileys over and give this thing with Six a fair shot…but Joshua is making that difficult. Not simply because he is in her way at every turn, but because—as one tropical adventure leads to the next—she’s beginning to wonder if obnoxious, odious Joshua might be the brother she actually belongs with.
Excerpt
A love story is like a bus ride. You can take the express—short and to the point, not exciting but it gets you where you need to go—or you can make it a road trip. Lots of transfers and stops, operating with blind hope in search of the extraordinary.
I don’t need extraordinary, and I’m not a big believer in blind hope, but a thirteen-hour flight to meet an ex-boyfriend could hardly be deemed express either.
Honolulu comes into focus through the window of the plane—the jagged cliffs of Diamond Head looming to my right, white sand and the bluest water you’ve ever seen.
Come to Hawaii, Six said after the incident, the one that propelled me from mere fame to infamy. Let your publicist spin the whole thing as exhaustion.
He’s very persuasive, my ex. My best friend, Tali, would use the word opportunistic. In fact, that’s precisely the word she used. But she has far higher expectations of men than I do.
So here I am, sleep-deprived and stumbling off a plane into bright sunlight and clammy air, ready to give him another chance. Trying to ignore that there was a catch to this whole thing, one he waited to share until I couldn’t back out: his family is coming too.
“There she is!” cries a voice, and suddenly Six’s mom, Beth, is pushing through the crowd to hug me as if I’m her long-lost daughter instead of the ex-girlfriend she’s only met once.
It’s sweet, I guess, but I really need to remove my hoody. This airport either doesn’t have air-conditioning or considers eighty-five degrees pleasant.
“We got here a bit ago,” she says, still hugging me, “and thought why don’t we just wait for Drew?”
“Funny,” says a grim voice I’d know anywhere, a voice that makes my stomach tighten like it’s being sewn too small from the inside. “I don’t quite remember it happening that way.” I look up, up, up to find Joshua Bailey, Six’s brother, looming just past his mother like the Shadow of Death, six foot five inches of glowering male. His eyes meet mine, and we both scowl at the same time. The look he gives me is one part loathing, one part assessment. It’s the way you’d look at someone if you were hoping to make her death look like an accident.
“You’re sweating,” Joshua says, running a hand through his light brown hair. He makes the human ability to cool off when overheated sound like a personal flaw.
“And you look like you’re dressed to attend an estate planning convention,” I reply, letting my gaze raise from his khakis to his neatly pressed button-down. God, he’s such a dork.
A hot dork, however.
If karma was really a thing, Josh would be hideous, but in truth he has the kind of eyes a lesser female might get lost in, such a pale blue against his dark lashes they hardly seem real, perfect bone structure, and a disarmingly lush lower lip—if you’re into that sort of thing. And he’s also ridiculously tall and broad-shouldered and muscley, the sort of guy who’d feel like a force of nature above you.
Again…if you’re into that sort of thing.
Review
(audiobook) Never a dull moment here. Forget the three acts rule–you can have more than that. The story was divided in several parts, each one a new chapter in Drew’s life.
The first chapter is actually off page, since we start the book when Drew is already giving Six a second chance. Then the author slowly introduces all the characters of the story, in the middle of a Hawaiian road trip. Secrets, assumptions, resentment, insecurities, health troubles, all of that create tensions between them all. Six’s second chance doesn’t seem to go as expected; Beth, Six and Joshua’s mother, who already treats Drew like family, is hiding something; Joshua and his girlfriend have a tensed relationship; Drew and Joshua develop a weird friendship. They sure end the trip in a different place than it started.
The next part is dedicated to Drew’s career. There’ve been hints that it wasn’t the career she dreamed of, with a controlling agent who basically thinks for her. But after experiencing the closest she had from a family life in Hawaii, she has a hard time getting back in the flow. We learn more about her own family too. All while continuing a long distance friendship with one of the Bailey brothers–I won’t say which one.
The rest of the book follows those two main plot lines–Drew’s budding relationship on one hand, and the way she takes back control of her career on the other hand. None of them goes smoothly, with set-backs and hiccups. As Drew slowly changes her perspective on her life, she makes decisions that don’t always end well, inducing a new shift of perspective and new decisions. Though the male love interest has his fair share of chapters with his point of view, Drew’s development arc is clearly the core of the story.
The audio was a good one. The female narrator did amazing both with the emotional moments and the banter. There was a smile in her voice for the playful dialogues, and a wet note to it for the angsty scenes. The male narrator was great with raw emotions. All in all, they were both perfect for this emotional story.
Quickie
- Series: standalone (but linked to another book by the same author)
- Hashtags: #rockstar romance #love triangle
- Triggers: substance use, violence, fat shaming
- Main couple: Drew Wilson & (Six Bailey or Joshua Bailey)
- Hotness: 5/5
- Romance: 4/5
- + it was a real saga, each part more gripping than the previous one
- – there’s this character I had little respect for…
Stalker mode
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