I thought this would be a cute story. I DNF’d at 13%. I got turned off after the hero meets the heroine and puts his arm around her while someone is taking their picture. They don’t know each other. Then hero expressed interest in the heroine and the heroine is not interested in dating a baseball player. The hero is then given the heroine’s phone number by the heroine’s BFF. I couldn’t get passed that. It made me feel like the heroine didn’t have control of her choices and life. The heroine’s mother is very ill and it seemed like the heroine might have a martyr syndrome happening, so very quickly a lot of things were problematic for me so I felt it was best to move on.

Hard Rhythm by Cecilia Tan

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the first two books in this series so I was dismayed to discover I did not like book three. The story starts out interesting enough with a “spanking contest” between Chino and Maddie. The attraction has always been there but Maddie has a bit of a chip on her shoulder towards Chino and apparently all it took was some kink to knock it off. From there Tan builds the romance while introducing random subplots to give the story a bit angst and controversy.  Not bad but I didn’t get the same level of connection or chemistry between them that I got from other couples. What did me in was I couldn’t take the conversations between Chino and Maddie. Every time one of them opened their mouth I cringed. At times they sounded like d-listers from a porn set.  Overall, this story didn’t have the easy flow and organic cohesiveness I felt the first two had.