Flawed by Tracy Wolff

This is the fourth in a series of book about Ethan Frost.  But it isn’t about Ethan Frost, but about his brother-in-law.  And since I hadn’t read the first three books, I didn’t care.  The heroine, Tori, is a hot mess.  She’s a wealthy socialite living off her trust fund but searching for love in all the wrong places because her parents are cold to her and her father is a ***hole.  She seemed like a Paris Hilton sort of character.  Add in her hair dyed a rainbow of colors and a body full of tattoos and I was having a hard time warming up to her.

The hero, Miles, is one of these guys who appear only in romance novels.  He’s a computer genius with mad hacking skills that the Russians must covet.  He’s also extremely tormented by what had happened to his sister in the earlier novels when, we learn early on, their parents reacted to her being raped by a rich guy by accepting money from the guy’s family to fund Miles’ research so they could all become rich off the sister’s rape.  He didn’t know about that but blames himself for being so oblivious.  

Tori is the sister’s best friend.  While Miles and Tori can’t forgive Miles for profiting unknowingly from her rape, the sister has forgiven and gone on to marry Ethan Frost who is so wonderful and rich that he got this whole series of novels named after him.

Bad stuff happens to Tori because she has made bad choices about the guys she slept with.  Her father disowns her and basically flings her to the paparazzi.  She ends up having to stay in a house with Miles.  Of course, they get over their mutual antagonism and have hot sex.   They have some more hot sex.  And then Miles uses his mad computer skills to get revenge on Tori’s behalf.

I couldn’t warm up to Tori.  She seemed immature instead of simply “flawed” as the title indicates.  The H and h go from her strongly disliking him and his being contemptuous towards her to hot sex in the middle of her crisis.  This did not make her more mature in my eyes, but that is basically what we’re supposed to believe.  In the space of a couple days they fall deeply in love and all their flaws are fixed.  I found that I didn’t care about her or her problems.  

If Miles were as hot and smart as he’s depicted, he could have done much better, but I guess he was too flawed to leave the house to find another, more mature woman, so had to make do with the flawed woman who suddenly showed up ready to distract him from his research into making a miracle desalination  process that would save California from its drought.  Because computer programming nerds also can be desalination engineers.  And also very muscular and hot because they have all that time to build up their muscles while being nerds.  Just go with it.

Thank you to Net Galley for a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.