Beautiful Brute by Eden O’Neill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I gave him my virginity.
Beautiful Brute
But it turns out he wanted so much more.
Stepbrother nightmare. That’s Jaxen Ambrose.
He’s beautifully vicious, lethal, the villain, and I’m nothing but the plaything that gives him his high.
He says I must pay for my sins. I do that or he’ll end me. He’s got it in his sick mind I’ve done something to him. That I’ve taken something from him but I’m no thief.
The only thief is him. My enemy, my obsession. He involved me in his wicked game without me even knowing. Before he was cruel, he was kind, a stranger who’d been gentle and sweet. I even believed him capable of love.
Only, that love turned out to be what I should fear most, his wickedest play of all. It’s true that his cruelty could break me.
But his love could destroy me.
Surprising stepbrother/bully/roommate romance!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙🖤❤️💜
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍🌎
Character development: 🤨😟😳😍🥰
The heroine: Cleo – she was brought up by her mother and since she was eleven, by her stepfather as well. Her stepfather was a senator and her mother worked for him. They lived in a modest home in Miami, and she was a good girl. Her best friend and roommate since freshman year is named Kit. She is staying at home for the weekend before going off to her senior year in college.
The Hero: Jaxon – when he was eleven, his father remarried and moved to Florida, he stayed with his mom and hasn’t been there to visit, but decided it is time to get to know his father again. So is moving down to Florida for his final year in college. He is still angry at his dad for cheating on his mom and breaking up their family, despite the fact that his mom found love with another woman and has been happy.
The Story: Cleo goes to a nightclub while her parents are away, they should be home late the next day and Jaxon will be arriving at about the same time, so she goes out dancing with her best friend Kit. When she meets Brett, he checks off all her boxes. He is tall, muscular, handsome and has dark messy hair and bright green eyes. She decides to take him home to her childhood bedroom and lose her V-card once and for all. Though in the morning when her parents come home early, she is surprised and runs downstairs to greet them, even more surprising, is when Brett comes downstairs, and she finds out he is really Jaxon.
You know what was really weird about this book? Cleo’s parents gave her a car for her high school graduation and she wanted a 1970’s station wagon. What??? What is wrong with this girl? Who in their right mind would ever want that? I think nobody since I haven’t seen one on the road for more than 25 years. Also, she talked about how modest her parents’ home was but also, they have staff, like gardeners and she had nannies, and they have ‘people’ that could run to the store if she needed something last minute before she left for school. I think her idea of a modest home and mine are very different.
This was a stepbrother/bully/roommate romance, since it turned out that Jaxon was the third roommate in their co-ed dorm at Bay Cove University. I have to say that I really thought Jax was childish at first, still hating his father so much. However, there was one point when his dad took him and his three best friends golfing for a weekend, and he didn’t recognize the three friends even though they had been friends even before his father left. Royal had even been their next door neighbor. It really made me see how he could still be so mad at his dad. Especially since his dad adopted Cleo and apparently was a great father to her, all the while ignoring Jax and not contacting him until he was out of high school. I can say of all bully romances I have read, this one was one of the few that I could actually understand his anger towards both his father and the girl that basically took his place in his father’s heart,
“I think in that moment I truly did hate him, but not because he had me cornered in this shower. But because of what he gave me and took away. To what he’d allowed me to feel only to end up being a psychopath in the end. He was crazy. He was psycho.”
The story turned out to be much better than I expected and even better than the first few books in this series. There were plenty of family secrets and a lot of pain from the past that needed to come out into the light. Plus there was a lot of chemistry between Jax and Cleo and I liked that. It was surprisingly good and I really enjoyed it.
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