(Finally, a real fighter’s romance story)
What happens when in order to win, you’re forced to lose?
The only daughter of an infamous Las Vegas pimp, Raven Morretti grew up an outsider. Liberated from the neglectful home of her prostitute mother, she finds solace as a mechanic. With few friends, she’s content with the simple life. Flying under the radar is all she knows, and more than she expects.
Until she catches the eye of local celebrity, UFL playboy Jonah Slade.
Weeks away from his title fight, Jonah is determined to stay focused on everything he’s trained so hard to achieve. Undefeated in the octagon, he’s at the height of his career. But resisting Raven’s effortless allure and uncomplicated nature is a fight he can’t win.
Jonah trades in his bad-boy reputation and puts his heart on the line. But when her father contacts her, setting in motion the ugly truth of her destiny, Jonah must choose. In a high-stakes gamble where love and freedom hang in the balance, a war is waged where the price of losing is a fate worse than death.
Will the hotheaded Jonah be able to restrain his inner fighter to save the woman he loves?
Or will Raven be forced into a life she’s been desperate to avoid?
BOOK REVIEW
.
I came to find this book on Goodreads while looking for some fighter romance books. I have read some already, and would pick apart the books, to see how real or not I felt they were. I read the introduction above and was very skeptical at first, but was pleasantly surprised in the end.
I love it when I can connect with a book and it took me back in time to when I myself used to be a fighter. I would train with MMA fighters like the book described and even traveled with a team of MMA fighters. During that experience we were very much in each other’s lives. All the training hours we spent together, conversations about life events, but we mostly focused on things that kept us in the zone of a fighter. Getting back to the book, the author writes about a romance between Jonah “The Assassin” (every good fighter has a hook name) and Raven the only female mechanic in a car repair shop. The author chose to alternate the Point of View (POV) with Raven and Jonah, which I loved because I often wonder what each character is thinking at the moment. You learn more about Raven’s past, which comes to haunt her present and threaten her future. Raven grows up really fast and you feel for the lack of support surrounding her, but the good thing is that Jonah’s friends are very protective of her, just as they are with him.
Jonah on the other hand, is straight alpha male but turns into a teddy bear with Raven. The growth in him goes almost too fast in this book and that is why I gave it 4.5 and not 5 stars. Jonah enforced their relationship so fast it was almost unbelievable.
.
With the support of friends like Blake (who gets the next book of the series) who has behaviors and mannerism of some true fighters. I love the fact that the author threw in a female MMA fighter Camille Fisher whom Blake called crazy for wanting her man to know how to get out of a choke hold, which I find is a very practical need.
.
Now let’s talk about Blake, Jonah’s best friend who kinda steals the show for me. Blake has some daddy issue’s but he is a loyal-to-the-end kind of friend. He has major womenizing issues and you can already tell that he is covering up for something but the author does not let on in this book. Quotes I enjoyed in this book:
.es
“It doesn’t matter how you were raised or who you were raised by. All that matters is who you are now”. – Jonah
“The woman I see right now, she’s something special.” -Jonah
“You’re like that single wild flower that grows from the crack in the pavement: miraculous growth with no water source or fertile soil. A person walking by would step around that flower to avoid crushing it. It’s not like the field of wild flowers you tromp through carelessly, crushing them under your feet, knowing that the next day will bring a hundred more.” -Jonah
.
These are some of the sweet statements Jonah – who has never had a serious relationship in his life – says about Raven. Both characters have tragic histories but came out on top in the end. Not to give away the book but you will find out that in the end that working together on their issues rather than in secret worked better. I was happy to read at the end that the author is writing another book about Blake, who was the comic relief in this book.
I don’t normally do not casting for books, but this image (below) kept screaming to me, ‘Blake’. I could not help but to think of my old trainer’s son Brandon “Ruckus” Thatch (Fighter name Ruckus). Below is a mini doc of Brandon “Rukus” Thatch, a bad-ass MMA fighter. The YouTube doc reminds me of the scene in the book that describes Jonah getting ready for his fight for the title.
About the Author:
Her love of good storytelling led her to earn a degree in Media Communications. With her journalistic background, writing has always been at the forefront, and her love of romance prompted her to sink her free time into novel writing.
Fighting for Flight is her first novel in the MMA romance series.
For more information on the series or just to say hello, visit JB on facebook or goodreads.
http://www.facebook.com/JbSalsburybooks
