Tough Luck Hero by Maisey Yates

In the last two months my fiancé and I finally moved in together.  This means that he now has to share space with my 600+ romance novels and my romance novels have to share space with his 7 video game books.  Getting married is all about compromise, I suppose.  Anyways, our apartment is still a little chaotic and my iPod charging cord has been misplaced.  So, when my iPod died and I couldn’t bring it to the gym I had to start bringing my books instead. 

I read, and reviewed, Maisey Yates’ Take Me Cowboy about a week ago and found it to be a cute, easy, romantic read.  So, when I had to work out and needed to choose a book I grabbed Yates’ newest novel, Tough Luck Cowboy, coming June 28, 2016.  Reading a book on the Crossramp isn’t the easiest, but reading Tough Luck Cowboy made the whole experience a tiny bit less sucky.

In this novel we meet Colton West, briefly mentioned in Take Me Cowboy, on his wedding day.  Well, it was supposed to be his wedding day, but his bride never showed.  So, Colton, shamed and humiliated in front of friends and family, grabs Lydia Carpenter, his least favorite person, and together they wind up in Vegas and married.  Though they’re fairly certain they won’t survive a marriage together, they both know they can’t just end it and get divorced.  Colton is already dealing with some heavy family shame and Lydia is so close to being mayor that she can almost taste it.  They decide to stay married and pretend to be madly in love, which turns out to be more difficult than they imagined considering they are at each other’s throats constantly.  It’s even more difficult when they realize that they’re both fighting an insane attraction to one another.

Usually I get turned off a novel when the author creates unrealistic situations with even more unrealistic reasoning backing it up.  So you can probably understand that I was very hesitant to believe that Maisey Yates would be able to convince me that two people who despise each other would agree to stay married.  However, Yates managed to do just that.  The motives that both Colton and Lydia had to stay married, without spoiling your read, were plausible.

Another bright spot of the novel is that the characters were relatable and really well thought out and, for the most part, unique.  Obviously they had the typical alpha male, independent woman trope going on, but I liked the time that Yates spent developing their backgrounds.  Without giving away too much, I will say that at one point in my reading I realized I was actually tearing up.  I have laughed out loud during readings, gotten really angry, applied an ice pack to the back of my neck during particularly steamy sections, but I don’t know if a romance novel has actually made me cry before. 

Oddly enough, my biggest complaint is that I didn’t think there was enough drama, which is a feeling I do not usually have.  I felt that the whole book wrapped up one or two dramas short, but overall it was still an entertaining read.  The ending happened organically and I did not feel that the relationship that developed between Colton and Lydia was rushed in the least.

Maisey Yates writes an entertaining, romantic read.  I will definitely come back for more.