The Deal (Off-Campus, #1)

by Elle Kennedy

[EBookObsessed]

This book was recommended to me and as a fan of Elle Kennedy’s Killer Instinct series, I was happy to give it a try. It was an enjoyable new adult story, but it took me awhile to come to like these characters. This is not my favorite new adult book but still much better than many of the standard tropes on the new adult shelf.

This novel combines two new adult tropes, the rape survivor and the college sports star. I was not enamored with Hannah and Garrett at the beginning of the story. Both were a little full of their own importance. Hannah can’t be bothered to tutor the popular jock and Garrett takes advantage of his popularity and is a bit obnoxious with the line up of girls he sleeps with and tosses aside. He and his housemates/team mates should install a revolving door to make things easier.

Hannah doesn’t register in Garrett’s world until he is about to fail a class and then he will have to sit out the remainder of the hockey season. He then pulls out all the stops to get Hannah to agree to work with him so he can pass the make up test.

Naturally, once Garrett takes a second look at Hannah, he can see that she is actually attractive. Yet, even though he is developing an interest in Hannah, it doesn’t stop her from walking in on Garrett having sex with some nameless ‘puck bunny.’ That to me it a bit of a turn off in a romance. I prefer that my hero isn’t still having meaningless sex with strangers once he turns his eye on the heroine. But, that’s just my preference.

It is after they have been working together for awhile that a friendship started to grow between them. It is once Hannah and Garrett start to become friends, and we start to learn more about their characters, that I start to like them both more and start enjoying the story.

We learn about Garrett’s abuse under the thumb of his NHL superstar father. His father physically abused his mother and then Garrett after his mother’s death. All the while, signing autographs and being adored by the fans who are not aware that at home he is a violent tyrant. It is torturous to Garrett that even his team mates worship his father and lament how lucky Garrett is to have a superstar father.

We also learn that Hannah was ruffied at a party when she was 15 and raped by a hometown high school hero. After years of therapy, she has moved on. She has had lovers since the rape, but indicates she hasn’t orgasmed during sex. When Hannah originally agrees to “The Deal” to help Garrett, it is because she wants to date the newest member of the baseball team who comes off as smart and not the horn-dog that the other jocks are. Garrett knows this is a ruse on Kohl’s part, but he needs to get Hannah to agree to tutor him so Garrett’s plan is for Garrett and Hannah to pretend to date, which will make Kohl finally notice Hannah.

Once Hannah and Garrett become friends, Hannah asks the very experienced Garrett to help her try to orgasm so that when she and Kohl eventually date and have sex, she will not be a disappointment to him. What cements Garrett as a hero to me is not the fact that he agrees to have sex with Hannah, but that he goes online and researches how he should approach sex with a rape victim, and he talks to some people about how he should handle the situation instead of just using his ‘expertise’ to make sex good for her. He makes sure that he approaches the whole thing slowly and patiently so that Hannah will not be harmed by something he does.

I ended the story enjoying the couple that Hannah and Garrett had become and how they have helped and supported each other. Their relationship helps them mature greatly in the short period they are together.

THOUGHTS:
This was not my favorite new adult story and it did take me some time to like Hannah and Garrett, but once they started to open up to each other, I did come to appreciate Hannah and Garrett as a couple.

Elle Kennedy does have an easy writing style which makes the story fly by and there are no slow parts.

What did surprise me at the end is that although Garrett infers that Kohl is playing up the smart, thoughtful jock, he finishes the story as just a nice guy that Hannah didn’t pick. It seemed more like halfway through writing the story, Elle decided she liked him and wanted to keep him for a hero in a future story since there were already enough antagonists here.