Title: Now Or Never
Author: Stella Rhys
Release Date: January 11, 2020
★★★★
**Kindle Unlimited
He’s ten years older. My brother's best friend. And for the next two weeks, he gets to have me in all the ways he’s ever wanted.
HOLLAND
The last time I saw him, he still called me kiddo.
But fast-forward five years and more than a few things have changed.
He’s still Iain Thorn. He’s still my brother’s best friend and the painfully sexy man I clearly never stopped wanting. But me?
Apparently, I’ve grown up in more ways than he can resist.
IAIN
I’m going to hell for looking at her like this.
She’s too young for me. Too sweet and naive.
She has no idea what I would do to her.
But since the day she walked back in my life in that tight little dress, I’ve felt myself caving. I said I’d never in my life get involved with Holland Maxwell.
But since I’m already going to hell, I might as well make it worth it.
Sooooo.... based on the blurb for this book, I found myself pretty unsure as to whether this book was going to be sexy or creepy. I feel like, for me, age gap romances, especially ones that lean pretty heavily towards being sexual, can really go either way depending on how they're handled by the author, but this one really kept it both sexy and pretty sweet for me.
This is Book 5 in Stella Rhys's Irresistible series and, as is pretty common for me, I jumped in here and haven't read any of the other books - but I seriously suspect I will after this because I really want to see the stories of some of the peripheral characters in this book that I get the very strong suspicion happened in the books leading up to this one. Probably should have looked into it before writing this. Didn't. Could stop now and check. Not gonna.
Anyway, let's start with the actual review, shall we?
I just wanna jump right in with Holland, our main character, because I absolutely loved her. I loved finding her at the place she's at in her life, where she's really made strides towards independence and the freedom she's always craved after growing up in a situation that sounded more and more traumatizing (although in a pretty unique and fairly well handled way) as we learned more about it. She's strong in the way that I like my female characters to be strong. She knows what she wants and is determined to work towards it, but in a way that feels very human to me. Sometimes "strong women" in books are presented as basically sociopaths or cruel for no reason, which is always infuriating to me, so I was really happy that this book didn't do that.
Our hero, Iain, was also pretty swoony. I loved that we really saw this progression of him throughout the book as his iron fisted control over himself begins to slowly slip as he gives in to what he wants and allows more of those things that he's been holding back to slip through. Initially, he felt kind of cold to me and I wasn't sure what to make of him, especially when he took steps to assert control over Holland's life that were actually really kind of shitty, but as we sort of see him unfold on the page he really did make perfect sense and I loved his character development.
When it comes to the romance between these two characters, there was one thing that really stuck out for me that put it in contrast to a lot of similarly plotted books that I've read and that was that even though initially there was a timeline and rules and whatnot for their time together, as the characters feelings and wants changed they really did let those things slip instead of being married to them. It felt really human to me that they would try to keep things within parameters that they were comfortable with or that made what they were doing okay but ultimately they would want more and give in to that. That feels to me much more realistic than digging in and sticking to some arbitrary rules that they set at the beginning. It also really helped to make it feel like we were seeing these two characters really fall for each other.
Honestly, as I really think back to this book I think what impresses me most is that it subverted my expectations because where other similar books go right, it went left - and I loved that. I love a brother's best friend/best friend's brother trope so much - it's one that will always make me try out a book - and I felt like it was handled so, so well in this book. There are two specific things that happen in the book where I was expecting it to go one way and it ended up going in a completely different direction, very much for the good of the story overall.
Also, let's just put this out there... This book is sexy. And actually sexy. The chemistry between these two characters and the way that it unfolds just felt so damn right and so damn real because even though the initial relationship was purely based on sex, we did see that movement in the relationship. For context, in some books where the basis of the initial relationship is sex, it ends up being all sex, all dirty talk, all shoving each other up against walls and then suddenly as a reader I'm supposed to believe they're in love. And most of the time, I just don't. I think this dynamic is actually one of the reasons that I maintain that it's hard to write a good romance - you can throw sexytimes at people all day, but if you don't balance it with a realistic growth in the relationship it ends up feeling false.
If there's one critique I have for this book it's that I wish that the relationship between Holland and her mother had been explored a little bit more fully and had some kind of resolution in the end, because I felt like it was a little bit untapped. I think there was such an interesting dynamic there and I would have liked to have a little bit more context to it and a little bit more of a resolution somehow. That's actually a backstory and driving aspect of the main character's life that I can't remember ever seeing in a romance novel and I wish it would have been explored a little bit more.
Anyway, I really, really enjoyed this book and I'm looking forward to reading more from Stella Rhys because she has really tapped my interest with this one.
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