Bad Boys After Dark: Carson
by Melissa Foster
Release Date: July 11, 2017
Book #3 in the Bad Boys After Dark series
Part of the larger Love in Bloom series
Number of Pages: 246
Contemporary Romance
Ages 15 and up
CW: grief, death of a sibling
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Second chances really do exist…
As the founder of a multimillion-dollar international security business, Carson Bad exposes secrets for a living. He knows better than to forge relationships built on them. But for years he did just that with his best friend, and secret lover, Tawny Bishop. She brought a sense of calm and understanding to his life—in and out of the bedroom. Until one fateful night when a knock at the door changed everything.
Tawny is no longer a naive college student. She’s a sought-after perfumer living in Paris. She has plenty of resources at her fingertips, and lots of lonely nights to think about the only man she’s ever loved—the one she ran away from all those years ago. She needs to move forward with her life, but how can she when Carson still owns her heart?
Maybe showing up in the middle of the night unannounced isn’t the best route to unraveling the past and figuring out her future, but Tawny has played it safe for ten long years, and it’s only made her long for the man she never should have walked away from. Now she’s back in Carson’s life, and he’s determined not to make the same mistake twice. If only he knew what that mistake was…
Carson and Tawny seemed to have spent their whole relationship with missed opportunities and crossed signals. They were the best of friends in college and madly in love with each other, but neither admitted as much for fear of losing their friendship. Yet at some point in their relationship, they started setting aside one day a week to explore their sexual appetites with each other. But only for that one day a week and every other day they acted as though there was no other connection between them.
While Carson has always been attractive and charismatic, he wasn’t quite the player Tawny thought he was in college. She ended up realizing she couldn’t handle being one in a line of other women and broke their relationship off. Not just the steamy side of things, but their friendship as well. Ever since she’s compared every potential relationship to Carson and vice versa. So when these two meet back up after ten years of no contact, sparks fly. And it’s a beautiful, sweetly awkward, emotional reunion.
For the most part, I enjoyed this story. But I felt there was a huge missed opportunity. Carson is a security expert with a hugely successful company. At one point in the beginning, before the couple is back together, Tawny talks to her ex-husband who is concerned about her as they’ve remained friends after their divorce and he knows her history with Carson. I kept waiting for the ex to be a jealous stalker-type presence in her life but nothing ever came of that. It was kind of dropped. It just seemed odd to me that the ex and his caring nature and the fact they were still close and talked often was brought up a lot in the beginning and then never talked of again.
I enjoyed the chemistry between Tawny and Carson and the way Carson’s family helped Tawny to let go of her inhibitions. The Bad family is fun but also has a lot of emotional hardships in their past, which make them an interesting bunch. So this story was a decent and solid read for me.
3.5 stars
All In Good Time 