Isaac Laroche is cursed. All he wants to do is hide out and feel sorry for himself. Never mind that he got caught sleeping with his seventeen-year-old piano student, or that he abandoned her when the truth was exposed.
Isaac’s feisty high school sweetheart has different plans. Heather Swann has returned to their hometown of Mobile, Alabama, to regroup after breaking up with her troll of a fiancé. She’s restless and looking for a diversion, but she bites off more than she can chew when she sets her sights on rehabilitating Isaac with her unorthodox sexual, mental, and physical plans.
The two quickly reconnect, but their happiness is threatened by family secrets, old vendettas and the death of a beloved father-figure.
Can Heather handle Isaac’s baggage, or will her own come back to haunt them both?
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Let me begin by saying that I kinda thought Isaac could just go ahead and DIAF when Want, the NA companion to Need, ended. Yet, when I finished Need, I was a fan through and through.
"But Annabelle, you hate asshole guys masquerading as heroes," you say. I know, I really do, but the author didn't cop out and didn't ask the reader to forgive Isaac for his sins based on hotness alone. Lawton masterfully transforms Isaac Laroche from a childish, self-serving coward into a man who takes responsibility for his actions and stands on his own two feet. With the help of Heather and some of her rather, ahem, unconventional methods, Isaac realizes what he thought he wanted wasn't at all what he needed.
Lawton handles this character growth with such a deft hand that you don't even realize it's happening until you reach a point where you say, "Damn, this guy has finally figured his shit out." That, my friends, is something rarely seen genre fiction today – especially romance. Even more, this story has a true happy ending, not just throwing the characters together against all odds for the sake of the perfunctory HEA. For me, the emotionally healthy ending is the only true HEA, and Lawton does not disappoint.
I think I actually jumped around my room in joy during certain parts of Need. I find so very few authors who craft with real story arc and character growth. Plus, she uses five-alarm-fire sex scenes to achieve this in realistic and emotionally beneficial ways for her characters.
Some entry–level BDSM fun, the uncovering of even more social politics and secret lives than you would imagine, and lots of emotional upheaval make for a fantastic debut in the world of erotic romance.
Grab a copy at any of these retailers
- Inkspell Publishing (paperback and digital)
- Barnes and Noble (paperback and Nook)
- Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
- All Romance eBooks (digital)
- The Book Depository (paperback)
- Kobo (digital)
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