Never Loved (Dark Obsession, #1) by Charlotte Stein 
Series: Dark Obsession #1
Published by Loveswept on July 21st 2015
Genres: MMA/Fights, New Adult
Pages: 207
Format: eBook
I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
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[box style=”rounded” border=”full”]This is one of those books that called to me when I saw it. What I didn’t realize it was saying was “Save yourself. Run away!” I was so intrigued by this one, that I jumped it up my list. Unfortunately, I was horribly disappointed. [/box]
Beatrix and her brother, Tommy, were abused by their father. No matter how perfect they tried to be, there was always punishment. It was like living with the Sleeping with the Enemy husband, or actually living the book, Flowers in the Attic since locking them in the basement for days at a time was a favorite torture of his. Now they are finally free. Their father is dead and Beatrix is using her inheritance to finally go to college, but her brother is self-destructing after all the years of torture.
One night while looking for her brother, she gets help from the mostly of heroes. A punk biker with muscles, tattoos, and a mohawk. Normally, Beatrix would be too afraid to speak to someone like him…okay, she was too afraid to speak to someone like him and she never expected him to go out of his way to find her brother for her. Or to seek her out again the next day.
Serge recognizes the pain in Beatrix. Like knows like. But he can’t imagine that he would have anything to offer the young college girl with the bravery of a lion that she would search the seedy streets alone where her brother was tossing away his life.
Serge wants to protect her from the hurt that Tommy will bring into Beatrix’s life but he knows there is a darkness that comes with him too, and he’ll do anything to protect her from that as well, even it if means staying away.
THOUGHTS:
I was offered a copy of Never Loved and while I have an endless TBR list, this story made me look again until I couldn’t resist. I love a misunderstood, wounded hero that finds a heroine who can understand him and bring sunshine to his darkness. Never Loved was attempting to give me that, but the writing style was so confusing and disjointed, I think we got there, but I’m still not sure. I checked Goodreads to see whether or not this was Charlotte Stein’s first novel and was shocked to see that it was not. Maybe for a self-published book or a first novel, I could forgive the fact that the story did not flow or that some of the scenes left you filling in the blanks or trying to figure out what the hell just happened, but this was an edited book by a previously published author, published through a publishing house. I haven’t read any of Charlotte Stein’s other stories, but truly WTF?
What I found most frustrating was the author’s need to spend paragraphs, I mean paragraphs between each line of conversation while the heroine tries to understand how each line was conversation affects her. Over and over again, Ms. Stein’s writing style dragged me out of the scene instead of letting the conversation flow between the characters naturally, and then letting me know how each sentence Serge uttered was affecting Beatrix.
There were page upon page of a scene at the beginning of the book where Serge brings the unconscious Tommy to Beatrix and knocks on the door. Beatrix can’t decide why Serge is there, why he is helping her, does he mean to get into the apartment and kill her? all the while Serge is outside going “he’s pretty heavy,” “what would you like me to do with him,” while we all wait for her to decide what to do.
Since I had a Kindle copy which has no page numbers, I kept trying to find out how many pages this story was since it was truly an abbreviated storyline which made Beatrix’s constant inner monologue all the more frustrating. The basic storyline is two people who consider themselves odd meet, he helps her with her troubles, they fall in love way too quickly, they have sex, he pushes her away, she is hurt, she realizes something is wrong with that scenario, and finds out he pushed her away to protect her from the bad people in his life. They magically solve the problem and live happily ever after. I am still not certain what happened at the end because some of it didn’t make sense as to why the bad people would hurt or try to kill Serge because that wouldn’t get them what they wanted in the long run. That was more necessary as a plot point to push Beatrix away rather than making sense storywise.
I was utterly disappointed at the end of this and am actually quite surprised that I made it to the end now that I think about it. I am not certain why I didn’t just walk away. Maybe because of the brevity of the story I was finished before I could toss it. This is one story you would do yourself a favor to skip.
