Book 2 in the Life on Stage Series
🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 2.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Beat yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
I was rooting for Flynn going into this one. After everything he did for Cooper and Kate in Throb, I genuinely wanted him to get his own happy ending. And then this book made it almost impossible to keep rooting for anybody.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
Lucky co-owns a bar called Lucky’s — her late father’s bar, now run jointly with her best friend Avery since he passed. She’s stepping back to a silent partner role to focus on her actual career as a voice coach, and the night she meets Flynn happens to be her last night as an active working partner.
Flynn is at the bar waiting for someone who stands him up, and that’s when he meets Lucky. He’s immediately into her. She turns him down. Turns out the person who stood him up was Dylan Rider — Lucky’s boyfriend, a rock star with an ego the size of his tour bus, and someone you can tell from page one is bad news. Dylan’s almost certainly cheating, needs constant validation, and gets increasingly frustrated whenever Lucky doesn’t fall in line with whatever he wants. So he finds a workaround: Flynn, his opening act, has been dealing with vocal nodule issues, and Dylan arranges for Lucky to join the tour to work with him.
Which puts Lucky and Flynn together. Constantly. And the more time they spend together, the harder it gets for Lucky to deny the attraction. Flynn also helps her work through something she’s been struggling with personally, which only deepens the connection.
And then they sleep together. On the bus. While she’s still with Dylan.
This is where I stopped rooting for either of them. I have zero patience for cheating, and the fact that it happens on the actual tour bus — where literally anyone could catch them — makes it worse, not more romantic. Lucky starts questioning whether she ever really loved Dylan, but that doesn’t change what she did while still technically with him. They try to put distance between themselves afterward. It doesn’t last. They keep finding their way back together, even taking Flynn’s niece to the movies and playing house like a couple while Lucky is still attached to someone else.
At this point I didn’t like a single one of them.
Flynn wants Lucky to just choose him already, which — fine, but I have to ask what he thinks happens next. He’s signed on to open for Dylan’s tour for months. If Lucky leaves Dylan for him, does he genuinely believe Dylan just shrugs it off and keeps him on as an opener? Dylan is exactly the kind of guy who’d burn that bridge to the ground out of spite alone.
And he does. Dylan never confirms what happened between them, but he clearly suspects it, and he kicks Flynn off the tour with a plane ticket home and a threat — contact Lucky again and his band loses the opening slot, and Lucky loses her job. When Lucky confronts him about it, he admits everything, then turns it into a second threat aimed right back at her: go to Flynn and the same consequences apply.
Then he asks for one more night, framing it as an amicable goodbye. Instead he proposes to her publicly. She can’t say no in front of that many people without humiliating him, so she says nothing — and everyone assumes that silence was a yes. She clarifies later that she never actually agreed. After that, the threats against her job and Flynn’s career escalate further.
Flynn ends up in a meeting with his record label, and the implication is strong that Dylan got him dropped, though it’s never fully confirmed whether the label cut him loose or he walked. Either way, he’s searching for a new label. Avery, Lucky’s best friend, eventually texts Flynn from Lucky’s phone saying she’s miserable, and if he’s miserable too he should meet her at the bar.
Dylan shows up there too, uninvited, wanting to talk. He apologizes for the names he called her. She apologizes as well, which he takes as an opening to get back together — and she shuts that down immediately, tells him she loves Flynn, and asks him not to take any of this out on Flynn since they haven’t even spoken since the tour. Dylan storms off. Flynn happens to walk in at that exact moment, and Dylan punches him.
A fight breaks out. But with the tour and the fake engagement both finally behind them, Lucky and Flynn get together for real.
Here’s where I land on the two of them: Flynn slept with someone who was in a relationship, and Lucky cheated on her own boyfriend on the same bus where she knew exactly how much damage it could do if she got caught. Yes, we find out Dylan was likely cheating too. That doesn’t make what she did okay. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s an old saying that fits perfectly here — how you get them is how you lose them. I stopped rooting for this couple the moment they cheated, and I never fully got back on board.
Eventually they get married. Lucky gets pregnant. They keep the label and end up landing their own concert. Four months after his split from Lucky, Dylan marries the porn star he’d apparently been sleeping with for years — and based on how far along she looks, it’s heavily implied she was already pregnant before he and Lucky even broke up.
Best Part of This Book
Flynn’s niece. Genuinely the only consistently likeable presence in the entire book.
Worst Part of This Book
The cheating. Both of them. I don’t care how unhappy Lucky was in her relationship or how clearly awful Dylan turned out to be — sleeping with Flynn while she was still with Dylan, on his own tour bus, made it impossible for me to root for either of them for the rest of the book.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 — Warm, not overwhelming. The heat is there but it’s not the main draw of this one.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed, honestly. The ending wraps everything up neatly — marriage, baby, career success — but it never really earns it after the way the relationship started. A tidy bow doesn’t undo the foundation it’s built on.
Would I Reread It?
No.
The Hot Take
How you get them is how you lose them. Flynn and Lucky’s relationship started with betrayal, and no amount of a happy ending afterward changed how I felt about how they got there.
Who Is This For
If infidelity as a plot device doesn’t bother you and you just want to see Flynn get his own book after how much he did for Cooper and Kate — you might enjoy this more than I did. If cheating is a hard no for you, skip this one entirely.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
🎧 Audiobook
- Audible Canada — Amazon.ca
- Audible US — Amazon.com
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- 🎁 New to Libro.fm? Get 2 free audiobooks
📱 Ebook
📚 More from the Life on Stage Series
- Book 1 — Throb | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 4.2/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 — [Read the Review]
- Book 2 — Beat | Reviewed by LD | ⭐ 2.8/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥 — [Read the Review]
Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Series: Life on Stage Book 2 | Genre: Romance | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥 | Narrators: Sebastian York, Molly Glenmore
Ready for more from LD? [Find them here](https://plottwisted.ca/category/reviewed-by-ld/)