Falling Under by Lauren Dane (Ink and Chrome #2)
Contemporary Romance
August 4, 2015
Forever

Reviewed by Helyce

Favorite Quote:  “She seemed to float into my life, and once she touched down, the roots grew very deep very fast.  I wasn’t expecting love. Knocked me on my ass.” [Duke]

Duke Bradshaw is co-owner of Twisted Steel, a custom motorcycle shop.  When his office manager lets him know that she’ll be moving, he approaches his neighbor, Carmella Rossi, about taking the job.  He knows she’s currently unemployed and knows she has experience working in a shop.  He thinks she’ll be the perfect person for the job and it doesn’t hurt that she is gorgeous and sexy!

Carmella Rossi has been quite aware of her sexy neighbor, so when he stops by one afternoon and offers her a job, she’s thrilled.  She’d only been unemployed a short time, and hadn’t really looked, so it must be fate that this opportunity just kind of fell into her lap.  And it doesn’t hurt that she’d be working around a lot of sexy, biker bad boys.

Duke and Carmella’s attraction to each other is obvious to both of them, but Duke’s the boss so nothing can come of it, right? Carmella is not looking for anything long term though, and if she and Duke can set up some ground rules and follow them, then a friends with benefits relationship might work.

All is well, until love gets in the way…

This story started off great.  I really enjoyed Duke’s character and Carmella as well.  I liked that she was a strong, intelligent young woman and I liked that she easily moved into the position of Office Manger at Twisted Steel, getting all the workers organized and following her rules for a more smooth running shop.  Duke and Carmella are hot together and I liked that they seemed to really be in tune with each other.  Neither is looking for anything long term, and they set up some ground rules that each of them can live with to make how they spend time outside of the office separate from their working relationship.  They get together pretty quick, and I was ok with that; they’d been neighbors for a while and both had lusted after the other so when the opportunity presented itself it made sense that they take advantage.

I liked that Duke, who never had trouble getting with a woman, seemed to easily fall into the role of a one woman man almost without realizing it.  Carmella becomes special to him and they get comfortable with each fairly quickly, but Carmella, while very open with her sexual needs, keeps her personal walls up.  She had it tough when she was young and had to grow up quickly; the mother daughter relationship a bit flipped as she found herself taking on the role of caring for her mother who had horrible taste in men and suffered from mental illness.  So, Carmella grew up with a skewed view of relationships and all this was compounded when she herself got married very young to a man who deceived her and who she ended up divorced from.

Unfortunately, Carmella’s issues and her continued insistence on not allowing Duke anywhere into her personal life kind of brought this story to a halt every single time Carmella closed Duke out.  Everyone has baggage, and when you’re in a new relationship I can see why you would take things slow and not divulge every single thing about your life with your partner until you were comfortable-but Carmella’s continued avoidance of the issues she had with her mother caused their relationship to suffer from a repetitive pattern of them fighting and making up but not really making any headway or growing the relationship’s trust.

There is a turning point where an incident occurs and Carmella is forced to give Duke some details. He does his best to be supportive even while not really on board with Carmella’s choices.  The tables turn later in the story when Duke finds himself in a situation with his own family and an incident involving his younger brother. The inclusion of this felt very forced to me.  We knew very little about Duke’s family other than he felt he had a good relationship with them.  Yet they’d been keeping important things from him for years.  This is introduced, but I didn’t feel it wasn’t sufficiently explored other than to give Duke some sort of parallel family issue.

To top it off, there is an ongoing story arc in the periphery involving the expansion of the Twisted Steel shop and it’s grand re-opening, but the story ends without this event taking place which left me with an overall feeling that left me wanting.

Scenes with secondary characters, round out and provide humor and a delightful change of pace from the repetitive back and forth our H/H suffered from as they navigate their relationship. Asa, PJ, Mick and Craig round out the cast and fill in nicely.

I struggled with this story at times, found it easy to put down which is not the usual when I read Ms. Dane.  I liked our main protagonists, but found Carmella’s personal issues to be just a bit too much.  I was not surprised when the conflict introduced at one point was the overused ex-boyfriend returning to cause problems.  Thankfully it was a short lived conflict which was sorted out quickly.

In the end, we do see our H/H together, but their journey was just a bit lacking for me.

Rating: C

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