Title: Tell Me To Stop
Author: Charlotte Byrd
Publisher/Year: Byrd Books 08/06/19
Length: 165 Pages
Series: Tell Me #1
Overview
I owe him a debt. The kind money can’t repay.
He wants something else: me, for one year.
But I don’t even know who he is…
365 days and nights doing everything he wants…except that.
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” I say categorically.
He laughs.
“I’m going to make you a promise,” his eyes challenge mine. “Before our time is up, you’ll beg me for it.”
My Thoughts
This is a light and sweet novella that is a launching pad I think to a bigger series. We find ourselves in Boston, with two friends that are in interesting circumstances. They’ve got very different backgrounds which puts them in different financial positions, yet they are great friends. Olive is our main character, and she’s trying to make a new life for herself. she grew up in less than ideal circumstances, a father that’s gone, a brother that’s passed and another that’s in jail. Her mother has chronic pain and has bad addiction habits that keeps her on the wrong side of things. We also see that the mother daughter relationship here is not one with anything good to save.
Olive’s taken student loans to get the education that she craves so that she’s able to move herself far from where she’s from, and will have to pay those for the rest of her life basically. It all changes when one day she receives a check for the exact amount of money that she owes and her life’s trajectory will change. She doesn’t know who the money is from and what strings are attached but what she does know is that she has to take a chance and make a leap.
She deposits the money, accepts an invitation to go to Hawaii to meet the person who’s funded her, and from then on, the story takes a few interesting twists.
What we learn of NC really makes us wonder what’s going on in the world. We learn his story and his motivation to help her out and yet we aren’t sure exactly what he has in mind for her long term. He wants Olive to be with him for a year, but at what capacity and for what reason we’re still unsure.
Olive doesn’t trust and so she goes home only to be tricked by her mother. Her mom owes a lot of money to a bookie and pulls a scam to scare Olive into settling her debt. It’s a shame that her mother doesn’t see the amazing woman that she has in a child, but it’s also not surprising. The decisions that Olive makes as a result make us as readers smile, and maybe shock us a bit because in her shoes, I don’t know that we would do the same.
What I do know is that we find Olive putting herself first for once, and what that means is that the games are about to begin. I don’t know what games, and I don’t know how exciting they will be, but I can imagine that they will be hot, and full of chemistry and passion. So on to book two I go !