Stripping Her Defenses (Ex Ops, #2)

by Jessie Lane

[EBookObsessed]

Rating: 3 1/2 stars

Even the greatest love can be torn apart, but it can also be mended if the love is strong enough. This latest novel by Jessie Lane deals with depression, mental health, loss, and reconnection.

Kara and Riley Sullivan were high school sweethearts. After they married, Riley went into the Navy and Kara attended college and worked hard to become the perfect Navy wife. Yet it was Kara’s need to be “perfect” that ultimately destroyed the foundation of their marriage. Kara was determined to be different from her showgirl mother. With diet and exercise, she tried to keep her shapely form from developing. Since Kara’s father abandoned her and her mother, she had underlying abandonment issues and the harder she tried to be perfect, the more she pushes Riley away. Riley knows something is wrong with Kara and their marriage, but instead of confronting her, he avoids her taking on more and more voluntary missions. This cycle continues as the harder Kara tries to be perfect and fails, the more abandoned she feels as her marriage begins the fail.

The final straw is when Kara losses her unborn son in a car accident. She falls into a depression, and she runs away from Riley and their already frayed marriage.

The story takes up eight years later when Riley needs to go undercover to find out who has been abducting women and selling them into sexual slavery. A pattern of missing strippers in the Florida area, have them going undercover as part of a motorcycle club. They infiltrate the MC’s strip club to keep an eye on the patrons. Riley is shocked to find out one of the headliners is the woman who still haunts his dreams. Riley stopped trying to win Kara back and let her go on with her life at the request of Kara and her therapist but he never would have expected to find his shy wife boldly flashing her new curves for a room full of horny men.

Now that he’s found her, he won’t walk away again. Riley is going to make Kara face their past and come home with him where she has always belonged.

THOUGHTS:
The characters in this story are great and I have a definite interest in finding out what happens with Riley’s brother Declan and with Lucas and his missing girl. The beginning of this story is heartbreaking and it shows that sometimes love is not enough to keep a marriage together. These two people are very much in love from the moment they met in chemistry class at teens. Yet, it is our own made up demons that can destroy us. Even years after their divorce, these two are filled with a lot of “If only’s.”

My overall problems with the story included plotlines, or maybe what I thought were the plotlines, which fell short or were rushed over. No question that Riley prefers his curvier and more sexually adventurous wife which begs how he fell for the conservative, too skinny Kara to begin with. I understand that Riley walks away at his wife and her therapist’s request and he is stuck with a big bag of “If Only…”: If only he hadn’t been away when she has the accident. If only he had talked to her about her crazy issues, instead of avoiding her. Young Riley made wrong choices, but was never able to make them right.

It took years of therapy for Kara to get her head on straight, but she had her act together for some time. Her “If Only’s” stemmed from her own psychological issues. She wanted to explain that to Riley. She wanted to apologize to Riley. But in eight years, since she walked away from him, leaving him alone to grieve for his lost wife and child, she never went after him to say she was sorry. Even once he finds her and she knows she wants to explain and apologize, she keeps sneaking away from him because she doesn’t want to deal with him.

As far as plotlines, the beginning goes well, if not depressingly. Riley finds Kara and he is not happy about her stripping, but Ice explains to Riley what happened with Kara that made her want to get on stage. Even understanding that it is something that Kara needed to do, he wants her back and he wants it to stop regardless of whether it is something she needs to do.

As part of the new, more sexual Kara, Riley finds out that his wife is into more kink then when they were together, which would lead you to believe that there will be some erotic sex scenes going to be tossed in, but after their first stimulating encounter, this was not explored again.

There is also the indication that trouble haunts Riley and Kara’s reunion and we do see that someone is making trouble for Kara. I presumed since she was a stripper and since Riley was the club to find out who was abducting strippers, these plot points would coincide. Wrong! Kara’s trouble comes from another front which is unrelated and seemed a little out of left field considering all the other things that were going on in the story. It confused me because there was a big deal made that Kara, who strips masked, would be unmasking to celebrate the club’s anniversary. Since Riley sees her before she strips, the unmasking isn’t to reveal her to Riley, and isn’t to reveal her to a kidnapper so what’s with the mask and who cares if she is taking it off. Don’t bring up a plot point that has no purpose.

After Kara abandoning Riley (yes, for an understandable purpose), never trying to find him and explain and then she tried to avoid talking to him at all, their reunion seemed to happen too fast. Not just the jumping each other for sex, but the determination of we will never split up again. We also leave these characters with the presumption that Kara is “all cured” and she won’t relapse in any way returning to a life with Riley. I don’t think I have ever heard of depression being “cured.” It is more of something that comes in cycles.

I also felt that this was a partial sell for the spin-off series of the Regulators Motorcycle Club. We meet Ice and Hammer who run the club and who will be the featured characters in Book #1 and #2 of the new series. I know that authors do this all the time, but it seems a more natural flow when you have great secondary characters that you decide need their own series, than to twist the storyline so you can introduce your new series in your current series. Personally, I don’t have much interest in any of the Motorcycle Club series that are out there. Both of these characters held some interest and there is obviously more to them than just motorcycle enthusiasts, but I really didn’t like them, not enough to make me want to pick up the Regulators series. Sorry, I usually avoid stories about Vikings, billionaires and bondage, dragon-shifters or fae realms and motorcycle clubs. That’s just me. Not interested.

Overall the story was well written and enjoyable and could have used some more pages so we didn’t feel rushed back into the reunion and the characters could have been allowed to reconnect and figure out their future in spite of their past. You could read this as a stand alone or as an intro to the new series.

Received an ARC from the author in exchange for an honest review.