Tough Love
Ultimate Series - Book 3
By Lori Foster
HQN - September 2015
Contemporary Romance
Tough Love is the third story in Lori Foster's Ultimate series. This new series is tied to multiple series. Primarily, it is closely tied to her most recent series, Love Undercover. However, the fighters in this new series are part of the SBC, and so the stories are also tied to her SBC Fighter series. If you want to read everything in order, start with SBC, then read Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor series, which ties into Love Undercover. Then there is Hard Knocks, the prequel to this new series.
Vanity Baker couldn't be more excited. This was it, the night she'd been plotting, er, planning for. Knowing that even the hint of a committed relationship would send Stack Hannigan running fast and hard in the opposite direction, she'd taken a gamble. She'd offered him one night. Not the night of the offer, but after he played "plus 1" at their friends' wedding. What Stack didn't know was that Vanity was gambling on forever.
Stack couldn't take much more. Vanity had taunted and tantalized him since the night of her offer, and it was finally time. Or at least it should have been if life didn't keep throwing curveballs at them. One was a rescue quickly remedied. The other was something much more difficult to extricate himself from. His family. He loved them to pieces, or at least he did his loving mother and ditsy sister. Not so much that man his sister had married and caused her nothing but heartache and misery. Useless and a user, in more ways than one. But could he be behind the sudden threats against Stack and Vanity?
Tough Love is exactly that, and in more ways than one. Vanity knew that Stack would be a tough man to love. Or rather, it would be hard to show her love for him, to him. So she hides it behind her attraction to him. Stack is a hero that will do anything for his family, except enable, and that is the other aspect of tough love. Stack's sister needed to wake up and stop letting her husband use her. I loved the interaction of Stack with his family, and Vanity's immediate adoption into their chaos. As always, Stack's fellow fighters are around and about, much to Stack's chagrin, especially when one in particular appears to maybe be a little too close to Vanity. Although Vanity claimed, at least to herself, to always love Stack, it didn't really show until later in the story. But overall, this was another exciting addition to the Ultimate series, and we are all ever so closer to one particular fighter's story!
Kathy Andrico - KathysReviewCorner.com
FTC Disclaimer: I did receive a copy for review. However, this website only posts "good" reviews. If I cannot post a positive review, I notify whoever has provided me with the book/ARC/ebook.