I picked up a copy of Sarah Urquhart‘s Sweet Abandon as an Amazon freebie a few years back.

Baker Bonnie Boone has had too many bikers dip their fingers in her butter cream. She’s done with them, but when a hot as hell biker rides into town, he slowly melts the single life she thought she wanted.

Easton Young, uncomfortable as a bear shifter in the city, hit the road in search of more of his own kind. His plans are delayed the moment he walks into Firebrook’s local bakery and smells his mate. Denying her will only cause them both pain.

She drops her guard, and he sees a home in her heart. But neither are willing to let go of their carefully laid plans, leaving their love in the dust, in sweet abandon.

This was sweet, and I liked that he fell first and he was growly but not a controlling alpha-hole. However, I did find him insufferable for much of the book, thinking he could have his mate without having to actually give anything up while she was expected to accept whatever scraps he tossed her way. (Of course, he wasn’t thinking of it that way. But…) Meanwhile, she was obsessively holding on to a hurt and refusing to allow herself happiness in a manner that barely made sense and certainly showed no adult emotional intelligence. They did both eventually grow past it all, though.

The real problem for me was that the whole thing was just ridiculously contrived. All the tension and conflict in the book could have been solved with a single conversation, which made it a little hard to feel deeply invested. Plus, despite being book a prequel to a new series, the Firebrook Bears series, it is pretty obviously a spinoff of something else.

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