Title: Stay Here With Me Series: The Wilder Brothers #5 Author: Carrie Ann Ryan
Genre: Contemporary Romance Tropes: Enemies to Lovers/Rock Star/Tortured Hero Release Date: August 14, 2023
BLURB
The Wilder Brothers from NYT Bestselling Author Carrie Ann Ryan continues with a secret romance that East and Lark never saw coming.
The world thinks I only write songs about my ex-boyfriends.
They study each lyric to point a finger at which man broke my heart—even if I’ve never met him.
Only the man I refuse to write about is the one who is so tangled in my mind that I know I can never be with him.
I had one night with East Wilder, and I know that’s all there will ever be.
He broke my heart without even trying.
Yet now I can’t seem to write a single verse and I need a place to hide while I figure out who I am. The Wilder Retreat will have to be my refuge as the Wilders prepare for my best friend’s wedding.
And when I’m there, I refuse to fall for East again.
Even if the dark shadows in his eyes draw me in. And the dangers of his past might be the one thing that forces us to finally give in.
I honestly hate to admit this but…. I wasn’t wild for this particular Wilder for a lot of the story!!!! He eventually won me over but it took a while!
We know from earlier in the series that all of the brothers have come home from serving their country with varying degrees of trauma and damage…. Scars both seen and invisible. East was really good at telling his brothers to open themselves up and talk in previous reads, to make them see what was in front of them when it came to their significant others but when it came to himself he was a tightly closed book – not once did he tell his brothers about his past, how things affected him and how much he was struggling.
I get that he was dealing with his demons (or maybe not dealing is a better description!!) but the way he treated Lark was awful and even though he knew it and acknowledged his behaviour himself, he was still an almighty ass. He assumed way too much about her and her work (choosing to believe what he heard rather than learning the truth for himself) and you know what they say about assumptions!!!!
Lark, I liked but the gods, she deserved better than she got from East and I just wanted her to tell him where to go for a lot of the story!!!! Yeah, they had a spark and hell they were combustible together but the constant pushing away would have been enough for me to walk away permanently from him and I found myself hoping she’d do that to maybe make him see sense and sort himself out. I hated that she had to constantly be on guard and that she could barely talk to someone without the media making up stories about who she was seeing and who her latest song was about. It was good that she had a retreat of sorts at the brothers’ resort and she had friends who were there for her, no expectations, just accepted her for who she was.
When he finally got his head together it still took East a bit to man up, be honest and open himself to Lark. I did like that he managed to connect with some people during the story and that these interactions seemed to help to degrees.
There was a little suspense in the story and while I think I understand why the character felt as he did I kinda would have liked a little more on his reasoning and thoughts!
All that said, I did enjoy this instalment of the Wilder Brothers series. I loved that the brothers all got themselves involved in trying to get East to talk (they seriously are a gossipy band of blokes!), I like the group of gals that were there for our leading lady and I cannot wait for the next book – after that little teaser at the end I’m so intrigued about the main characters in Finding The Road To us!!!
Carrie Ann Ryan is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of contemporary, paranormal, and young adult romance. Her works include the Montgomery Ink, Redwood Pack, Fractured Connections, and Elements of Five series, which have sold over 3.0 million books worldwide. She started writing while in graduate school for her advanced degree in chemistry and hasn’t stopped since. Carrie Ann has written over seventy-five novels and novellas with more in the works. When she’s not losing herself in her emotional and action-packed worlds, she’s reading as much as she can while wrangling her clowder of cats who have more followers than she does.
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Tracy 🖤💜🖤
Book Loving Pixies 
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