I just don’t know where to start with this book. I thought I would never get done reading it, but thank God I did. I can’t quite express how disappointed I was with it, but I’ll give it a try.
This book SUCKED.
The last book I read by this author was pretty good, as I recall. So when I saw this new one I bought it without hesitation or without reading any blurbs. My bad.
Our story opens with Noah, a security expert at Stuart Enterprises, a family business, following his errant ex-fiancée Lexy to a spa in the Utah desert. Lexy is one of the partners in Stuart Enterprises. She has dumped Noah, taken valuable files and locked Noah out of computer access for unknown reasons. Noah has given her a little time, but now he is unable to do his job and Lexy’s brother, Gray, has asked Noah to go find her and figure out what is going on.
Noah arrives at the spa (which is described in such a manner that only Auschwitz came to mind – blech for food, punishing hikes, no trappings of any resembling civilized life) to find Lexy avoiding him and refusing to answer any questions. She seems interested in the spa’s security director for some reason and he is determined to both win her back and figure out why she’s acting so strangely.
Lexy, it turns out, is a bitch. She has “issues” from her childhood that she uses as an excuse to be a demanding c-word. Her parents were pack rats so this means in times of stress she shops hysterically and buys lots of things she doesn’t need or want, then strews this stuff all over her living area. Huh. I do that same thing, so my parents must have been pack rats too. OMFG – I have a case for disability!
Noah tries to talk to Lexy about what is wrong, but, of course, she won’t tell him. What she refuses to discuss is that Noah has been accused by one of their major accounts of stealing from them. She is mad at Noah because he won’t discuss every little feeling and every little part of his past, so since he won’t dance to her tune and kiss her ass, she has decided that he’s probably guilty. She, a partner in a business, has taken his files, taken away his computer access and followed some kind of paper trail to this spa. She is not there to prove him innocent, mind you, just to talk to a person whose name came up in the paperwork, namely the aforementioned security guard.
Noah keeps trying to get her to talk to him about the problem but she continues to refuse. She doesn’t refuse to boff him, though, and they have sex quite a number of times with this thing hanging (ha ha no pun intended) between them. While Lexy is still avoiding the issue, they find the security guard dead in Lexy’s room. She, of course, is a suspect as well as Noah, although they were together at the time of the murder and know they didn’t do it.
Finally after tons of unnecessary dialogue with just about every character that just went on and on, and a stupid wrap-up of the murder and the uncovering of the actual thief in the company, Lexy finally tells Noah that she is hurt by the fact that he won’t kiss her ass and tell her every thought in his head and every single thing that he ever did in his whole life. Noah, being a normal human being and a man, says that the stuff that happened before doesn’t matter, but Lexy just can’t let it go. And since he won’t tell her everything that means he doesn’t love her so she leaves.
Just when you want to cheer and look up Noah and buy him a congratulatory drink for his narrow escape, Lexy comes back into the picture. She doesn’t come of her own volition; it is at her brother’s behest that she speaks to Noah about business stuff. During this conversation she allegedly realizes that she has been an unreasonable bitch and asks Noah to forgive her. And instead of being able to say, well, at least she realizes that she was wrong, she goes ahead in the last few pages and says they should get back together as long as he works on being better at telling her everything all the time.
I was so hoping that Noah would take a quote from Rhett Butler and say, “Frankly my dear, fuck off.” But he didn’t and I suppose they are out there somewhere, him wishing he could kill her and get away with it, her harping about her feelings and him not talking all the time.
Noah, baby, you deserve better.
Lots of sex in this one, but she was so unappealing and unattractive a character, who cares?
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