Review: Desperation (Meet Me in the Dark #1) by Jade Dare

                                                                 

Print Length: 134 pages

Publisher: Jade Dare (November 12, 2021)

From Goodreads.com: Desperation.

It’s the only thing that Sophie can blame for even considering the offer a stranger makes to her in an elevator. $300,000 to meet him at a hotel every Saturday for three months. It’s insane. It’s not even worth thinking about. Only, she can’t seem to get it, or him, off of her mind.

Yes, she needs the money to pay for her sister’s surgery, but she can’t possibly spend the night with a man she knows nothing about. It doesn’t matter that he’s sexy or that his voice all but promises she’ll leave the hotel room more than satisfied. There's no way she can accept.

And yet, she finds herself knocking on a hotel room door on Saturday night.

  

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My Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Books like this one are what I call my favorite kind of "palate cleanse." I seek them out when I've read too many historical romances and thriller novels because they tend to be exactly as they seem - an implausible storyline with some gratuitous smut & wrapped up with a happily ever after. 

And that is exactly what this one was. 

Sophie has given up on her dreams of going to school in order to work a dead-end job as a waitress (the tips are good according to her), in order to hope to raise the money her sister needs in order to get on the transplant list for a new kidney. As luck would have it, the elevator happens to break down at the same time she and an "extremely hot" (her words not mine) guy is. They have a brief exchange of words, at which time he offers to pay her $300,000 (more than the amount she needs) in exchange for her spending every Saturday for the next 3 months with him. Oh, and she gets to pick what hotel they stay at. How can she resist? 

Of course, they have an amazing time together & yadda yadda yadda. Now here is where I deducted stars from the overall rating. To begin with there were some minor grammatical errors throughout. Nothing too bad, but things I felt should have been caught even if the author was editing their own work. Those I could easily overlook. What I couldn't overlook was the fact that they (Sophie especially) started talking about having feelings and being in love with someone they knew nothing about. Even when they started communicating more than just once a week, they still didn't take the time to really get to know one another. That's not love, that's lust. 

And of course, once they do spend some time really getting to know one another, the truth about who Lawson is comes out and she absolutely loses her mind. I get it, she was shocked to learn who he was. HOWEVER. That day they met in the elevator? He told her he was there on business. When they spoke about his family? He told her his family owned medical facilities. He even knew the name of the woman who worked in finance who had given her such a hard time. Not once did he lie to her, yet she still chose to believe that he did. Even when he showed up for her, when he sent food to her and her sister, she still wanted to make him out to be a bad guy for far too long. I get it, stories need drama, but there was no reason this argument needed to drag on for as long as it did. 

However, that truth or dare game towards the end? Perfectly set up the next books in this series, and I enjoyed this one just enough to give those ones (and the three extra novellas that have also been published) a shot.