Brooklynaire by Sarina Bowen

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Title: Brooklynaire
Author: Sarina Bowen
Series: Brooklyn #1
Published by: Indie
Release Date: February 12th 2018
Format: eARC
Pages: 298
Genres: Romance, Contemporary
Source: the author
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2018 #LetsReadIndie Challenge, Lenoreo's 2018 Finishing the Series Challenge, Lenoreo's 2018 New Release Challenge, Lenoreo's COYER Winter Switch 2017/18
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks
My rating:

Blurb:

A sexy new standalone from USA Today bestseller Sarina Bowen.

You'd think a billion dollars, a professional hockey team and a six-bedroom mansion on the Promenade would satisfy a guy. You'd be wrong.

For seven years Rebecca has brightened my office with her wit and her smile. She manages both my hockey team and my sanity. I don't know when I started waking in the night, craving her. All I know is that one whiff of her perfume ruins my concentration. And her laugh makes me hard.

When Rebecca gets hurt, I step in to help. It's what friends do. But what friends don't do is rip off each others' clothes for a single, wild night together.

Now she's avoiding me. She says we're too different, and it can never happen again. So why can't we keep our hands off each other?

My Review:

I received a free copy through the author in exchange for an honest and unbiased review/opinion.

4.5 stars — Anyone who’s read this series has been looking for Nate and Becca’s story right from the start, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint.  Now you do not need to have read the rest of the series to enjoy this one, but I don’t know why you wouldn’t read them all.  😛  This was exactly the story I was hoping for, from start to finish.  I loved that while this could have been just a gratuitous “fan service” type of story, without meat of its own (since we’ve seen this potential couple on the periphery of all the other stories in the series), that’s not what Ms. Bowen gave us…she gave us chemistry and conflict and hard decisions and flirting and a satisfying climax and resolution.  Or, in other words, a full delicious story.

I loved that going into this book I loved both of our main characters, and they both lived up to my expectations of them.  Nate was just as adorkable as I was hoping he’d be, but nicely balanced with grrrr sexiness too.  He still made you swoon, but Ms. Bowen didn’t shy away from his social awkwardness.  He was entirely believable as a boy genius.

And Becca was everything I was hoping for as well.  She was just as sassy and quirky as I’d come to expect, but there was a lot of depth to her as well.  I loved that I fully understood her reservations about the relationship and how it would look to the public.  Often times that kind of reluctance in a heroine can frustrate me, but it really did make sense in their circumstances, and it was a legitimate issue.

And we didn’t just get present Becca and Nate, we also got to see glimpses of their history and how they met.  As such you got to see how their friendship developed, and how the feelings changed shape a few times over the years.  They really struggled to figure out how to make things work.

Obviously their chemistry was fantastic…lots of delicious sexy times.  And I’m a sucker for stories where one (or both sides) has a crush that they think is unrequited, but then they get pushed past the point of no return.

I ADORED all the nerdy flirting between the two of them…honest to god, I highlighted way too many dorky exchanges.  And OMG, Bingley was HILARIOUS!!!  Seriously, that whole thing just made me laugh and laugh!

I LOVED getting to see all the characters we’ve come to know and love, and I love that they all had little moments in the books.  I also appreciated meeting new characters.  I loved the way the working relationship between Becca and Heidi Jo changed…I always appreciate it when an author will take a stereotype and then show that no one’s that flat.

Honestly, my one minor complaint (and the reason for rounding down) was that I didn’t really enjoy the way the past chapters were written.  It’s just a personal taste thing I think, but they switched from 1st to 3rd person, and in a very distinctive style…which I did get used to, it just threw me off initially.  But the part that didn’t work is that I guess for some reason my brain expected past tense, and I kept tripping over the present tense…  It’s really mostly a me issue.  I will admit, with the different style, I almost expected it to be brought back in the end to tie it all up (maybe in the epilogue?), or to have a specific purpose.  But it didn’t.  Whatevs, it’s a tiny thing.

So yeah.  I love it when a story that is so hotly anticipated and still lives up to the hype, that’s not easy to do.