By Laramie Briscoe

Synopsis

A forced sentence leads to a reckless passion…….

Hadley

When my husband walked out on me over a year ago, it devastated me. When the divorce papers came, it killed me. When we had to sell our house, it broke me.

But then he moved in with his new flavor of the month and told our daughter his new woman wasn’t into children. That pissed me off.

Now Riley feels abandoned, and I can’t make it better; no matter how hard I try. I’m desperate to help her adjust to the loss of a male figure in her life. The companion program that matches adults up with children who have loneliness and abandonment issues is my last hope.

The counselors tell me he’s doing community service hours, and I ask to sit in on his meetings with Riley. The minute I see him astride the matte black Harley, I know neither my nor Riley’s life will ever be the same again.

Trick

Community Service. Two words I should be thankful for, but I’m not. I resent the hours it’s away from building my business. The two previous kids I’d been paired up with didn’t work out because their mothers were more interested in getting in my bed. This next match with a little girl is my last hope. Unless this kid works out, I’m destined to serve time.

When they push her into the room wearing pink converse with a black dress, her crazy curls barely held back by the barrette in her hair, and studious glasses on her face, I can tell she’s scared – of new people, of change, of being pushed aside. Something inside of me breaks, and I want this girl to feel wanted again.

What I’m unprepared for is meeting her mom. The second our hands touch, there are fireworks, bright lights, and a picture of the future I could one day have. The future I’ve never allowed myself to wish for.

Community service becomes more than a chore, more than time I resent for being taken away from me. In the months that follow, I realize they’re just like me: they’ve been abandoned, left behind by the world, forgotten by those who should love them.

Thanks to the one last hope in both our lives – we found the light in the darkness we’d been searching for.

Review

Hadley is a single mother to her six year old daughter Riley, and has been for the past two years since her marriage ended.  She’s struggling to provide the basics for her daughter, but one thing Riley doesn’t lack is her mother’s love.  She has no desire to date, but that changes when she sees Trick for the first time.  Trick is a nice guy who made some bad decisions that saw him on the wrong side of the law.  As part of his community service, he’s entered into the Companion Care program and is matched up with Riley, a girl in need of a male figure in her life after being abandoned by her father.  I liked both Trick and Hadley, as well as Riley.  Together they make a nice family and it was nice to see how quickly and easily Trick fell in love with Riley and vice versa.

TRICK is told in dual POVs, is a stand-alone and comes with a nice HEA.  From memory, there’s no conflict between Trick and Hadley at all, and the only real test of their relationship came from an unlikely source.  I thought G, a customer of Trick’s, was going to cause problems considering his dark threats at the beginning, but he just faded into the background which left me wondering why he was even in the story in the first place.

I did like TRICK and I finished it pretty quickly because it easily held my attention.  That being said, I spotted some pretty big errors that I’m surprised weren’t picked up by the beta readers.  Hadley says receiving the divorce papers destroyed her, but later on she says she filed for divorce.  Riley says her mom is twenty-nine and her dad is forty-two, but later in the story Hadley says her ex-husband is fifteen years older. I also struggled with the timeline surrounding Trick and Hadley’s relationship and his community service hours.  Trick has nine hundred hours to do and they are together for about two months when his hours are completed.  At sixty days, that works out to fifteen hours of community service every day, which is not possible with him working and Riley being at school five days a week.  Without these errors, this would have been a 4❤️ read for sure, and maybe these will be fixed in the published version.

Trick

My Rating:  

Buy Links:  Amazon

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