Fight Me - Book Review

By Lacey Black

Synopsis

Jake Stevens has it made. A local police officer with an open invitation to any number of beds around town, Jake has no desire to settle down with any of the ladies he entertains by night. After watching his best friend fall in love with his little sister, Jake is certain that love and marriage just aren’t in his cards. Heck, he’s not even playing with the same deck.

After Jake encounters a blast from the past one night, he finds himself swimming in uncharted waters. For the first time, Jake has found a woman he can’t get out of his mind. The kicker? The woman wants nothing to do with him.

Erin Anderson returns to the small Missouri town of Rivers Edge for a job after a twenty year absence. Erin spent years loathing the memory of Jake Stevens for his cruelness back in seventh grade. Now, Jake appears to be the same self-centered player he was in junior high, and no one seems to be able to push her button the way the cocky, yet devastatingly handsome cop does.

Between circumstances that keep thrusting them together and Jake’s persistence to annoy her, Erin struggles to fight her growing feelings for Jake. But, can Erin get past the hurt she felt all those years ago at the hands of a young Jake? Can Jake show Erin that what they have is worth fighting for?

Review

Jake is Erin’s mortal enemy. Well, not really, but he’s pretty close. After embarrassing her terribly in seventh grade, she moved away from Rivers Edge to live with her grandmother. Twenty years later she’s back to take over the Librarian’s position. Jake is happy being a bachelor, jumping from one woman’s bed to the next, but when he meets Erin again, something inside him makes him take notice. Unfortunately for Jake, she wants nothing to do with him, still angry at how he embarrassed her all those years ago. But he’s persistent and slowly starts to break down her walls, using a small emergency at her house as his way in.

I enjoyed FIGHT ME, but not as much as I enjoyed TRUST ME. It’s a nice story, but I thought Erin let go of her anger too quickly for someone who had been harbouring such strong feelings for the past 20 years. She is a very nice woman who fits well into the Stevens’ family. Jake is very demanding, and as a cop he’s obviously used to his orders being followed. But I loved how Erin put him in his place by refusing his demands, teaching him that he might get better results if he were to simply ask. And I would have loved to have seen a bit more of Maddox and Avery’s wedding, to have been a bit more focused on them instead of Jake and Erin, just for the ceremony.

Jake: “For the first time, I’m actually considering a relationship with someone. Like a real, call each other all the time, have stupid cutesy nicknames for each other, only have sex with one woman, kind of relationship. What does that say? Am I a pussy?”