I will admit that I don't really know how to start this review. Chasing Desire by Jennifer Domenico left me with mixed feelings and I am a bit confused after just having finished reading it. This book was a lot different than I had expected, and I am not really sure what I am feeling right now. I think that this story started off good, and there was a lot of promise initially. But as the story progressed, things got muddled and turned into a mess for me. There was a lot going on, and yet it was really repetitive especially when it came to the dialogue. This one started off as being one I was really enjoying, but by the end of the story had lost my interest completely.
Braden James is the ultimate manwhore. He sleeps around, wants no commitment and has no problems with his life the way it is. But when he gets a promotion at his job and he starts to have women troubles as well as a bad dream, he decides to clean up his act a little bit. When Mackenzie contacts him about coming to work for his company, he is immediately drawn to her. He wants her and she wants him. But she is pretty much the female version of him and doesn't like to get involved with coworkers. Mackenzie and Braden find it difficult to fight what is between them and as much as they try to avoid each other, they eventually give in to their feelings. But can they make things work with their careers and their feelings for one another? And what happens when a threat they never realized was there arises and puts them in danger?
I really didn't like Brayden at first. He was cocky and arrogant, and a total user when it came to women. I like a reformed player as well as the next girl, but Brayden just rubbed me wrong right from the start. I did start to warm up to him though, and when he started to realize his actions and reputation were affecting his career I really did believe that he wanted to change. He started to become this great guy, and he was really sweet with Mackenzie. I believed in his transformation, and I could see that although he struggled with feeling love for the first time that he really cared about her and wanted things to work. Mackenzie was also a bit hard to warm up to. She had some issues and struggled with them which made her not be able to trust easily. She was having a tough time with her feelings for Brayden and didn't know how be in love with him either. I did like that she was able to eventually open up to him, but I think it took too long for her to get there and there was a lot of unnecessary conflict because of that. I think that Brayden and Mackenzie had a ton of chemistry together, and that is the one area that they never had problems with. They were really hot together from the start.
What really started to make me lose interest in this story is that we already had a ton of drama with Brayden's womanizing ways and the women who he left behind. But then things get truly bizarre when the contemporary romance turns into a suspense because a stalker randomly appears. Next thing we know there is someone stalking Brayden and Mackenzie, sending texts and making problems in their relationship, taking pictures of them together and sending them out and then a kidnapping. If this had been eased into from the beginning it wouldn't have been so much of an issue, but this doesn't even start until well into the book. Throw in an overzealous young virgin friend of Brayden's sister who won't take no for an answer and a bitchy coworker who is all bark and no bite, and this one just got weird. This book was pretty cheesy and had a lot of cliches and just didn't work for me. As good as this one might have started, it just steadily declined after the initial meeting of the hero and heroine. I kept reading thinking that it would get better only to realize that it was just the same thing with nothing to make it stand out or hold it's own. I wanted to like this one, but the repetitive dialogue and weird antics just made this one a miss for me. I think if readers go into this one expecting a suspense that it would help a lot, but from the blurb there is no indication of that at all which just makes it seem to come completely out of the blue. If you are a fan of suspense and like your romance on the cheesy side, you might give this one a shot.
**ARC Provided by Good Choice Reading**
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