Title: Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)
Author: Eden Butler
Genre: NA | Contemporary Romance
Release Date: August 31, 2015
Synopsis
He doesn’t ask their names.
He doesn’t deserve to know them.
Ransom Riley Hale’s friends think his life is charmed: first string as a freshman on a championship-winning college football team. A father with two Super Bowl rings. A mother with platinum albums and multiple Grammies under her belt. But that brilliant shine on the surface hides the darkness beneath; it’s all Ransom has ever known.
Despite the shadows he walked in, once there was a blinding light fracturing the darkness. It brought the promise of hope and happiness. He’d been careless, filled with pride and stupidity and lost that light. Ripped it from the world.
Now, the shadows are dimming again. Aly King surges into his life threatening to pull him from the darkness. She is everything Ransom can never be again. Her light feels too warm, promises him that there is more waiting for him beyond the shadows.
But the shadows are relentless, resurfacing when he thinks he is safe, and Ransom knows he must keep Aly from them too before he pulls her down into the darkness with him.
MY REVIEW FOR THICK LOVE:
I really don't understand it with this one, but I just cannot give it 5 stars. I LOVE Eden Butler, I mean everything about her work. I've read them all, and fell in love with each one. But for some reason, Ransom and Aly just didn't do it for me.
It took me a long time to get involved with them, unlike Kiera and Kona, who were immediately ingrained in my heart. Ransom and Aly were not. I just couldn't find myself clicking with them. I loved Aly. Straight up, loved her. Hands down, a perfect match for someone like Ransom. She was this tough cookie who had already faced a crappy life, even before she met him, which gave her the perfect tools to be able to take on his demons. And demons they were. I'm not sure if I've seen someone carry around so much misplaced guilt before. At the same time my heart broke for Ransom and the pain he felt, I wanted to shake him to remind him that it was all an accident, and he was still alive. Even if he wasn't living.
We do get to see something in this book that we didn't in Thin Love, and that's Kona being a father. A true father- one who deals with the pain and grief that his kid endures, all while supporting him to his best ability and always reminding him of how loved he is. It really just makes you fall even harder for Kona Hale, even if this isn't his book.
Now, the other reason for my 4 star rating, is simply due to the ending of the book. While I understand that Eden has decided to make theirs a two part story, I still felt unsettled after reading the epilogue here. At the end of the last chapter, all was well with Aly and Ransom, and it appeared that they were in for the long haul. The book could have stopped there, but it didn't. There was this epilogue, which skips ahead several years. Years that obviously changed these two, and caused what they had to fall apart. I need those years. Better yet, I needed them to have not even happened. But, I'm not the writer, so I have to just sit tight and wait for 2016, to see what Eden has up her sleeve. Hopefully she won't let me down. But, then again, she never does.
Thick Love – Excerpt
“Dance with me,” I said. He only stared up at me blankly.
“I don’t feel like practicing.”
“I’m not asking you to practice. I’m asking you to dance.”
Ransom’s body stiffened when I picked up his hand, but he didn’t fight me. “Just be here with me. Me and you and the music.”
We came together in the center of my living room with that slow, soothing music wrapping around us. There was no Kizomba, no prequel to a seduction we both wanted to avoid. There was just Ransom bending low, arms around me, hand taking mine to hold against his chest. After a few seconds, the tension lessened, and his body did not feel as rigid. It felt peaceful, and safe, and simple—just two people, holding each other, swaying to the music.
His mouth hovered near my forehead and as we moved together with no form or practiced steps, Ransom’s grip on my waist got tighter. “I wish I could breathe again. I want that so bad.” The words were whispered, low.
I closed my eyes, reminding myself that I couldn’t touch him.
“Ransom. You can.”
He looked down at me and right then I saw just how lost he was. This realization didn’t come from flippant comments he made to me or desperate excuses I overheard him make. It was all there right in his eyes—the loneliness, the pain, as though each mistake he’d made was etched into the rise of his cheekbones and the worried, faint lines on his forehead. He was still drifting; he had been drifting for so damn long.
The pain in his eyes drew me in. There was nothing I could say that would make his hurt lessen. There was nothing that would take him from the lingering sorrow he’d created for himself. So I didn’t speak, didn’t give him advice I knew he’d never take. I just watched Ransom’s eyes, and felt the slow way he moved. And then with my hand on the back of his neck, I pulled his face towards me, I took his lips, kissing him, pouring into that kiss everything I’d held back from him since we first met.
This is who I am. This is what I want. That voice came from someplace hidden and secret inside me.
It was minutes, minutes of nothing but my mouth on his, nothing but two people finding solace in each other, before
I realized I’d messed up.
He didn’t seem to want me to pull away, but didn’t stop me when I did. Shaking my head, I smoothed the collar on his shirt, unable to look at him. “I’m…modi, Ransom, I’m sorry.”
Ransom pulled my chin up and smoothed his thumb over my cheek, down the slope of my chin before he returned his attention to my eyes. “I don’t think I am.”
It was a moment I thought I’d always wanted. Him looking at me like I was real, like he saw me, finally saw me. I’d seen that look once before, just as Ransom whispered my name and kissed me over and over the first time. It wasn’t the look of someone hopeless. It was open and raw and I realized right then that I’d give anything for Ransom to never stop looking at me.
But this was against our rules. This wasn’t how we were supposed to be. I took his hand, thought of pulling it away from my face but didn’t have the strength, liked how it felt on my face too much. “Friends don’t kiss, Ransom.”
A small nod, and his eyes narrowed. His grip around me tightened. The music around us swelled. “No, they don’t,” he said, still touching my face, inching closer and I knew, right then, he was definitely not my friend.
Books in the Thin Love Series
About Eden Butler
Eden Butler is an editor and writer of New Adult Romance and SciFi and Fantasy novels and the nine-times great-granddaughter of an honest-to-God English pirate. This could explain her affinity for rule breaking and rum. Her debut novel, a New Adult, Contemporary (no cliffie) Romance, “Chasing Serenity” launched in October 2013 and quickly became an Amazon bestseller.
When she’s not writing or wondering about her possibly Jack Sparrowesque ancestor, Eden edits, reads and spends way too much time watching rugby, Doctor Who and New Orleans Saints football.
She is currently imprisoned under teenage rule alongside her husband in southeast Louisiana.
Please send help.
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