Author: Courtney Cole
Publisher: Lakehouse Press
Pages: 220 pages
Genres: Contemporary Romance
Series: Beautifully Broken
24-year old Pax Tate is an asshole.
Seriously.
He's a tattooed, rock-hard bad-boy with a bad attitude to match.
But he's got his reasons.
His mother died when Pax was seven, leaving a hole in his heart filled with guilt although he doesn't understand why. What he does know is that he and his dad are left alone and with more issues than they can count.
As Pax grew up, he tried to be the kid his father always wanted; the perfect golden boy, but it didn't work. His dad couldn't overcome his grief long enough to notice and Pax couldn't keep up the impossible perfect facade.
So he slipped far, far from it.
Now, he uses drugs and women to cope with the ugliness, the black void that he doesn't want to deal with. If he pretends that the emptiness isn't there, then it isn't, right?
Wrong.
And it's never more apparent than when he meets Mila. Sweet,beautiful Mila Hill is the fresh air to his hardened frown, the beauty to his ugly heart. He doesn't know how to not hurt her, but he quickly realizes that he's got to figure it out because he needs her to breathe.
When memories of his mother's death resurface from where he's repressed them for so long. Mila is there to catch him when the guilt starts making sense. Mila is the one... the one who can save him from his broken troubled heart; from his issues, from the emptiness.
But only if he can stop being an asshole long enough to allow it.
He knows that. And he's working on it.
But is that enough to make her stay?
This story starts out with Pax in his car with Jill, a girl he dose drugs with. When he tells Jill to leave he dose more drugs and ends up overdosing. When Mila is on her way back from taking pictures she finds Pax in his car with orange-red puke all down the front of his shirt. When he dose not wake up and starts to have a seizure she call the cops. Before the cops arrive she ends up giving him CPR. Four days later he wakes up and finds he is in the hospital with an IV in his arm, and not sure how he got there. Later that day Mila comes to see him and that is the first time they meet. Thats when the story gets interesting.
At first I did not like this story, and I ended up putting it down a week or so. I think it was Pax I did not like, but I picked it back up to give it a second chance. I was pleasantly surprised I ended up liking this story a whole lot. I give this story five stars having surprises around every corner.
