I Was going to give this two stars if I was able to finish but, so help me God, I gave it my best shot and could only manage to get to the two-thirds mark.
The plot had so much potential. A bad ass arms dealer falls inlove with a girl next door artist and his enemies are after them. But aside from a little action in the beginning, nothing happens. The couple spends the majority of the book in his apartment over analizing their feelings for one another. THERE IS SO MUCH INNER DIALOGUE AND BACKSTORY. The author, while she came up with a good plot, clearly doesn't know how to write an engaging scene.
I disagree with some of the other naysayers here in that I didn't mind that the heroine was passive. I am actually quite bored with the overly feisty strumpets that are played time and time again in almost every other romance novel out there. Grace's character was refreshing in that sense, but we never really got to know her. While we are given a tremendous amount of backstory on our boy Drake, we don't really know anything about Grace.
That leads me to my next point, Drake. I get that we like our heroes to be out of this world and a bit over the top, but for Pete's sake, he needs to have some faults for him to be believable. Drake is a black belt in several different types of martial arts, is the best sniper in the world, has a rock hard body, a huge penis, makes ten million dollars a week, knows every single firearm ever made (seriously), is fluent in several languages, while he hasn't had sex in a really long time and has never been in a relationship and rarely sleeps with the same girl twice he still knows how to please a woman in bed and is an awesome lover, even though he grew up parentless on the streets and was part of a gang at an early age and has never had any close friends he's still an excellent communicator and very empathetic to Grace's every need, oh and he has manners - not because he learned them, but because he NATURALLY (yes the author really does make pains that we as the reader should know this) is a gentlemen. OF COURSE HE IS. And one other thing, he doesn't even care if he comes or not during sex as long as she has lots of multiples.
Sounds like a great guy, right? Well actually I never understood why he has to be so tender and caring. I thought the whole purpose about creating a bad boy fantasy was so that we could have a fantasy about falling for a bad boy. Why bother making him a deadly killer if you're just going to make him an emotional pansy?
Another major gripe that I have, the heroine sees her best friend get his head blown off and a few hours later she's having a romantic dinner with the hero discussing her best friend's body in the morgue and talking about bullet trajectories and CSI. SERIOUSLY? If I saw my best friend get their head blown off, or hell, anybody getting their head blown off, I'd probably be a withering mass of sobbing blubber for months, possibly years, to come. Actually, I don't think that the heroine EVER cries for her best friend.
Overall, this story is a serious case of telling not showing. There is so much inner dialogue and the story never really moves. There is one scene where the hero is masterbating while thinking of the heroine and I did think that scene was hot because there are rarely masturbation scenes in romance novels, but other than that, there was little redeaming qualities about this book.
