Title: Rough
Author: Skye Warren
Publisher/Year:  Skye Warren 2/8/17
Length:  164 pages
Series: Chicago Underground #1

Overview

Survival doesn’t come easy…

I’m a cautionary tale. A statistic. A victim. A single teenage mother from the poor part of town. Most of the time I’m too busy working and struggling to care what people think. Survival doesn’t come easy.

I have a dark secret, a pressure valve, a rare moment just for myself. On these nights I visit a club. There I find men who give me what I need. Men who aren’t afraid to take what they want.

Men like Colin.

But he takes more than a few stolen hours. He demands more than my body. He wants my heart and soul–my happily ever after. I never thought I’d be Cinderella. I never thought a man that rough could be my prince.

My Thoughts

The summary makes you think that this story is more dark and seedy than it is, but on the flip side, it’s not a fairytale. Pasts make the present into a situation that no one really wanted, and yet we all have to figure out how to find the happy ending.

We meed our leading lady Allie on her monthly ‘date night’- the one night a month that she gives herself to be selfish and to take what she needs, just to feel. See, events of Allie’s past have created this woman that she is today. She got pregnant by someone she thought was her friend, yet he up and ran. Mind you he also forced her, which I’m not sure we ever get the full story. She finds out she’s pregnant and is immediately kicked out of her house. Her friend Shelly decides that they are in this together, and they run away together.

Fast forward about 2 years, they are living in their own apartments, Allie is working at a bakery to support her daughter and Shelly is selling herself essentially to help cover off on costs that Allie can’t manage. They don’t have an easy life by any means, but they are surviving.

It’s on Allie’s night out, when she’s looking for someone to strictly take her mind off life, and in a non-gentle sort of way that she meets Colin.

He’s sitting at the bar and he’s broody and moody. He’s incredibly sexy and he turns away women as they approach him. Allie makes her move, and their worlds change.

For some reason, they are right for each other. While Colin is hard on the outside, he’s really a good guy – and we start to learn about that throughout this story. Allie doesn’t have trust and faith in men, so she fights what he has to offer, but some how Colin weaves his way into her heart.

He’s there to protect her and to bail her out when things get dicey and that’s more than anyone has ever done. When Allie’s ‘baby daddy’ shows up, Colin is there with a plan to help her out and offers her protection. Just when she thinks that he’s the one to do it, something changes, and their balance is thrown off. She feels alone again and isn’t sure what has happened and what to do to fix it. That’s where we find ourselves at the end of this first book – so of course that means that i’m off to read the next one to figure things out. Enjoy!