Cross Crease by Elizabeth Hartley

On October 7, 2019 by Jaye

Cross Crease by Elizabeth Hartey

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Blurb

Heaven

I was fourteen the first time I laid eyes on the smoking hot, silver-eyed, goalie. Damon Wolfe was the most gorgeous boy I’d ever seen. All it took was one glance, one sentence and my heart was his. But I was too young and he was too broken.

Seven years later, he’s the biggest off the ice player in the NHL and I’m his virginal best friend.

Of course, I have the perfect solution to that particular problem, but Damon keeps on refusing to be the one to vanquish my chastity. He claims he doesn’t want to ruin our friendship, that he’s not good enough for me. Yet, somehow his eyes say something different whenever he looks at me.

Just one night, that’s all I’m asking.

What’s the worst that can happen?

Wolfe

I was mesmerized by Heaven Andersen the first time I looked into her sparkling turquoise eyes. She was a teenage kid with a mouth full of braces and bruised knees, but she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen—like a fairy-tale princess. With one look, she sent all my inner demons running. But she was just a kid and I was too damaged.

Seven years later, she’s my best friend. My best friend with a single-minded mission—to get laid.

She wants me to take her virginity and teach her about sex. But she’s an off-limits, flawless diamond girl, and so far out of the realm of anything my blackened heart is looking for or deserves it’s laughable.

So, how come I’m not laughing? How come my best friend is the first thing I think about in the morning and last thing I think about at night? More importantly, what am I going to do to protect her—from me?

Links

Goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46805883-cross-crease

Purchase:

Amazon: https://books2read.com/u/47ErGa?store=amazon

Review

Let’s talk about all of the great things to love about this book first. There are some great side characters. All of them have their own stories to tell, and the stories seem compelling enough that I’ve actually purchased those books (although I received this one as a free copy for my own reading pleasure thanks to Xpresso Tours.) I love it when authors fill in the world around their characters – it helps to make everything more real and concrete.

The main character isn’t just some “puck buny.” She also isn’t passive. She’s got her own plans for a career and she’s actively putting them into motion. Heaven, or “Pippa,” is a bright and confident young woman and I loved that. When confronted by sexist nonsense she didn’t just simper and accept it, she confronted it and did her best to smash it.

The emotional arc for the male lead was an interesting one, and it was one I could follow without too much trouble. I was also intrigued by his back story – in fact, said back story was part of what drew me to sign up for the tour. The description gave me just enough of a taste that I wanted to see more, and when I did I really did become more sympathetic to him.

Unfortunately, Wolfe (D, rarely Damon) was my single biggest problem with the whole book. While his backstory was tragic and made me hurt for him, it didn’t excuse the fact that Damon was a sexist pig from the moment we see him on screen.

He openly states that he doesn’t have women friends (with the exception of Heaven, who he addresses as Pippa for reasons known only to him). He doesn’t want women friends. Women in Damon’s world have one purpose – brief sexual interactions. And by brief I mean he doesn’t share a bed with them.

Now, I can see why fourteen-year-old Heaven would be into this guy. He’s got the whole “bad boy” thing going on. He prides himself on the whole bad boy thing.

By the time she’s nineteen, she’s still into him. And frankly, by this point she’s old enough to know better. She knows she’s old enough to know better, but she’s still decided she wants him to be the one to “punch her V card,” because while she may be 19 she’s also 12.

This issue persists into her twenties, as she starts to pursue a graduate degree. She is still trying to convince this guy, who has told her no repeatedly, that she wants him to be the first person she has sex with. And he, despite his reasons for the contrary, becomes enraged at the thought of anyone else actually touching her. This guy was bad enough that I concocted an elaborate fantasy about his team playing the Bruins and Marchand doing something sneaky and vile that caused Damon to injure himself badly on the net. This fantasy involved a catastrophic cup failure, thus ensuring I wouldn’t have to hear him talk about his cock – or to his cock – for the rest of the book.

FOR THE RECORD, IN CASE THERE ARE YOUNGER WOMEN READING THIS: That is not romantic. Possessive behavior is not romantic, and a man who won’t “allow” other men to be with you even though he won’t be with you himself doesn’t love you. He thinks of you as a possession, an object. He is a dangerous person and you should run.

Away, I mean. In the opposite direction. Not toward him.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but here we are reading about some girl who sees this kind of behavior and thinks, not hey this guy’s got a problem, but obviously it’s fate and we’re meant to be together. I’m the one who will cure him of his need to sleep with every woman in sight.

Sorry. This segues into my second issue with the book. While Heaven was the kind of character I would normally enjoy, at least on the surface, the way she kept focusing on this guy who clearly didn’t respect women and treated her like crap meant I had a hard time respecting her. I knew she knew better. Sometimes she even decided she would do better, only to change her mind on the very next page.

At some point, you have to throw your hands up and say you deserve each other, and go back to your elaborate fantasy involving the Bruins. By this point Chara has gotten into the scene, it’s gotten ugly, blood is bouncing on the ice, the Office of Player Safety has been called, but no one will do anything because Damon Wolfe is just that bad of a person.

Ahem. Anyway.

Also, everyone is very focused on their genitalia. It’s weird. Damon talks to his.

There’s some odd casual homophobia going on. It’s not overt, it’s kind of strange. There’s a moment when Heaven calls Damon a cocksucker while she’s in a fit of anger, and it’s like, you’ve been fantasizing about that exact act for half the book and now you want to throw it around like there’s something wrong with it? Okay. And there’s a couple of weird no-homo scenes with Damon that just made me scratch my head. We get it, he’s straight, are you hinting he’s not? No? Well that would have made for an interesting plot twist but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to run into Damon at Pride, so thank you.

There were some very interesting, kind of subtle character notes I thought Hartey handled very well. Damon seemed to have a weird relationship with sex and sexuality. His childhood experiences form a lot of the basis for his feelings about sex, but he also has this idea that his excessive libido is just “normal” for guys. And he feels that his enjoyment of the purely physical act of sex somehow tarnishes him and makes him inappropriate for Heaven, who is a virgin. Again, his early experiences contribute there, but it’s an interesting dynamic. (The cover did promise an interesting character profile for Damon, and as much as I hated him he was an interesting study. Just one I wanted to kick in the junk. With a toe pick.)

Heaven too had her own views about sex and sexuality, and those were also shaped by her early influences. Those views included a very interesting set of parents and… Damon.

The book takes place around a hockey team, but there’s really very little hockey in it. Anyone who likes steamy, contemporary romance will probably enjoy this book.

Author Bio

As a lover of the northeast US, my husband and I moved to the Poconos several years ago to open a Chiropractic Clinic. Four children and a menagerie of animals later, I have finally found time to fulfill my lifelong dream of writing novels. A dreamer at heart, romance is—of course—the genre I spend most of my time writing and reading into the wee hours of the morning. However, if it’s a good book, any genre can keep me immersed in the story for hours.

When I’m not juggling work responsibilities and writing, I enjoy baking, knitting, traveling, hiking the beautiful hills and woods around my home and spending time with my family.

Author links:

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