🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 2.7/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ I finished this one, but only because it was short enough that quitting felt more annoying than just pushing through.
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Consumed by You yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
A volunteer firefighter, a dog trainer, a bet overheard from around a corner, and a two week hookup with a deadline on it. This one had potential and then spent most of its runtime annoying me.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
The Bet
Travis is at a nightclub with friends and is clearly into Cara. His friend bets him he can’t even get her to kiss him that night. Cara is standing right around the corner and hears the whole thing. She decides she’s not going to make it easy for him.
They flirt anyway. She changes her mind, they make out, he takes her down a hallway, she gets her orgasm and he gets nothing, and she leaves him there knowing full well what she heard. It’s actually a decent opening scene.
The Arrangement
Cara ends up training Travis’s dog Henry for a firefighter auction, which gives them a reason to keep spending time together. She decides she wants a short term thing with him, just until the auction. A deadline. No strings.
Travis spends some time establishing himself as someone who is not the commitment type, who is into some kind of kinky arrangement, who is basically not built for relationships. And then the book proceeds to not really demonstrate any of that. Doing it on the floor doesn’t make you kinky. It just makes you someone who did it on the floor.
They also have a past history that the book treats as a significant reveal, which was a letdown once it came out. They slept together right before he went away to university. That’s it. If he hadn’t left they might have stayed together. It’s not nothing but it’s not the dramatic twist it was treated as.
Meanwhile Cara is cooking him meals, daydreaming about him, giving him haircuts, doing all the things people do when they are very clearly falling for someone while insisting they aren’t. The two week deadline is doing no work at all.
The Wedding
They go to a wedding together as a date. Cara tells him she thinks they’re meant to be together, that she wants to keep seeing him past the arrangement, and that she loves him. Which is a lot to land on someone at someone else’s wedding after two weeks, and she knows it even as she says it.
He shuts her down completely. Tells her she doesn’t mean it, that it’s just the wedding getting to her, that they had a deal. I’ll give this book credit for one thing: it made it almost to thirty minutes from the end before pulling the third act breakup. That is genuinely longer than most books manage. But it still pulled it. And I am so tired of the temporary breakup as a narrative device. Sometimes two people can just get together and stay together without manufacturing a crisis at the ninety percent mark.
The Fear of Commitment Backstory
Travis goes to pick up his dog from his mom early and she figures out he was supposed to be with Cara but isn’t. The fear of commitment backstory comes out. It’s rooted in his parents’ relationship.
His mom’s response is essentially: their relationship was fine. He died and I was sad.
That’s it. That’s the trauma underpinning his entire emotional unavailability arc. I don’t know what to do with that.
The Auction
One night of sleeping on it and Travis is ready to commit. He coordinates with friends to get Cara to the fireman’s auction, has his friends bid him up to show he’s off the market, and delivers a speech about loving her.
They get together.
Best Part of This Book
The opening scene where Cara hears the bet and decides to make him work for it. That version of Cara was fun. I wanted more of her.
Worst Part of This Book
The third act breakup that the book absolutely did not need, and the commitment backstory that amounted to nothing. Also Travis being established as some kind of non-committal bad boy for the first half of the book and then being completely ready to commit by the end with almost no real progression shown between those two points.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 — The steam is there and the narrators, Erin Mallon and Joe Arden, are both excellent and elevate the material considerably.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Neither. I was just relieved it was over.
Would I Reread It?
Never. And you can’t make me!
Who Is This For
I can’t in good conscience recommend this one. If you love Erin Mallon and Joe Arden as narrators and want to hear them in something together, find a better book for them to be in. They deserved better material than this.
Where to Get
📖 Physical Book
Amazon
📱 Ebook
Amazon
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