Better When It Hurts

by Skye Warren

[Melanie]

In Better When it Hurts we have Lola who is a stripper at The Grand. The Grand was a nice theater from back in the day. Now it is just a strip club. The old ticket booths are now VIP rooms. Lola came from a foster home. She's had quite a hard childhood. She learned young that the best way to be safe was to give her body up to the strongest boy she could find. As soon as she turns eighteen, she finds one of her old foster mothers who has dementia and moves in to care for her. She starts stripping because that was the fast way for her to make money to pay the bills.

Blue is head of security for The Grand. He knew Lola from a foster home when they were teenagers. They had a relationship until Lola told people that Blue hurt her and he was taken away. He later joined the Army to keep himself out of jail. Blue sees what Hannah, as she was known as a child, as betrayal. He spends a lot of time thinking up ways to decide how he is going to make her pay.

I really loved this story. There are several flashbacks to time in Blue and Lola were younger. I also loved seeing the relationship between Mrs. Owens and Hannah. You can tell that they really care for each other. It really hit close to home for me, as my grandmother had dementia. Always worrying that they will leave something on and burn down the house can be really hard on loved ones.

The sex scenes are really hot. Blue does force Lola to come to his house and coerces her to have sex. He does like to give it a little rough. She has learned throughout her years of buying safety with her body, that rough sex is just a part of her life. Blue isn't the type of lover that just takes, he does give to her very well in the bedroom. More than she has ever had in her well experienced past. They do workout that there was several misunderstandings from their childhood which they do workout in the end.

I highly recommend this series for anyone who likes their romance on the darker side, but still with a happy ever after. You can read this book as a stand alone without being lost. Readers from book one will see Honor and Kip, but their part is pretty small. Ivan, the strip club owner, and Candy, another stripper at The Grand, have a larger part in this book, but will be our couple for book three. I'm really excited to read this book.

**Book was provided to me by the author. This review is my opinion and was not requested or provoked in anyway by the author.