Review: Sweet Ache by K. Bromberg

Sweet Ache
(Driven, #6)
By: K. Bromberg
Publisher: Signet
Release Date: June 2, 2015
Genre: New Adult Romance
Rating:

Hawkin Play, the bad boy rock star with a good guy heart, has lived a lifetime of cleaning up after his twin brother’s mistakes. Hunter’s most recent screw-up could land Hawke in jail and risk the band’s future. Hawke agrees to guest lecture at a local college to stay in the judge’s good graces—and a bet with his bandmate to seduce his sexy teaching assistant is icing on the cake.

Quinlan Westin is harder to bed than Hawke imagined. She knows his type and is determined to avoid the rocker at all costs—even if their attraction runs deeper than simple lust.

Just as Hawke might finally be winning over the girl, his brother has other plans. When Hunter realizes his twin finally has a weakness, he’ll stop at nothing to take advantage…

Sweet Ache is one of those books that I’m not quite sure about. You see, when we first meet Hawkin, he’s not just a lady’s man. He is so rude and a bit on the creepy side that it was hard to like him. I mean seriously, is it okay to be harassed and verbally assaulted by a guy just because he’s attractive? If the guy wasn’t drop dead sexy, would it still be okay for him to say things like, “Maybe I only want to fit in one hole” or “I’ll rub you any way you like if you want” ? No, I don’t think so. So why is it okay for a hot guy to say those things to a stranger? Should I touch base on the fact that he pursues Quinlan because he made a bet that he would not only sleep with her by the end of the semester but that his bad-mate would partake in the event to bear witness that he actually does the deed? Yeah, Hawkin was a real stand-up guy.

Quinlan definitely didn’t help matters either. She allows Hawkin to bounce between hot and cold with her and she continues to go back for more. Even at the beginning when he was just down right skeevy, she just couldn’t help herself from obsessing over him because he was just so hot, and they had this amazing chemistry. Again, it all goes back to the fact that if he wasn’t so dreamy, she wouldn’t take his crap… and this would be a really short book.

The good thing about Sweet Ache is that it’s written in both Hawkin’s and Quin’s point of view. So we get a behind the scenes look at Hawkin and what he’s going through on a personal level. He definitely has a lot of things to overcome and a lot of pain and suffering in his past and future. It’s hard not to start to soften for the guy. So, in the end I did start to feel for him. It just took a really long time for me to get there is all.

This was an enjoyable read but there was just so much that bugged me that it was hard to fall in love with it. There is a ton of internal dialog. A ton. I found myself skimming over it to get back to the story because there was just so much of it. Not to mention that the author made Hawkin out to be a disgusting pervert in the beginning. It was a very hard comeback for him and it almost didn’t happen for me. Like I said, it was an enjoyable read but not one of my favorites. On the plus side, even though this is the sixth book in a series, it can be read as a stand-alone.

“Because falling in love is like the rain. You can’t always predict it and when you do it might never appear, but you can always see the signs of it before it falls.”