Blog Tour: Ruin You Completely: Calia Read
Ruin You Completely (Sloan Brothers #3)
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I met Mathias Sloan in a club.
Truth.
I told him I was twenty-four.
Lie.
I told him my name was Olivia.
Lie.
Lie.
I thought that I would have a one-night stand and be done with him.
Truth.
I didn’t know that he was my new piano instructor for the next six months...
Truth.
I didn’t know that he was my new piano instructor for the next six months...
Truth.
We would come together and fall apart. After him, every man was ruined.
Truth.
If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have walked to him. I would’ve turned and run…
LIE.
We would come together and fall apart. After him, every man was ruined.
Truth.
If I knew what I know now, I wouldn’t have walked to him. I would’ve turned and run…
LIE.
Our flight was at eleven. I glanced at my watch. 8 AM. We should be in the car and on our way to the airport by now, but I couldn’t seem to move.
I was just hurting myself. Hope was for fools. The smart people in the world accepted that and moved on. And the fools, the ones like me, would never understand. No matter how much pain was tossed their way.
Finally, after a few minutes, I gave up. I adjusted the strap of my purse and walked toward the front doors.
Then I saw him.
He stopped in his tracks. So did I.
He was a disaster and there was no other way to put it. His hair was pointing up in crazy directions. I could picture him repeatedly dragging his fingers through it. He was still in yesterday’s clothes. His shirt was unevenly buttoned, as if he had jumped out of bed and grabbed the first thing he saw.
It soothed me, just a little, that he was suffering as much as I was.
He walked toward me, looking like a man on a mission, and didn’t stop until he was directly in front of me. Standing this close I saw that his eyes were bloodshot and a day’s worth of stubble was growing in.
“I thought you’d be gone,” he said.
I gestured to the limo waiting outside. “I’m leaving right now.”
His shoulders sagged and he closed his eyes. I’d never seen him look so defeated. “I’m sorry about last night. I fucked up.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
He stared at me imploringly, almost like he wanted to say something else but couldn’t get the words to form on his tongue.
“Stay,” he said.
We stayed apart, but he might as well have been touching me.
“I can’t, Mathias,” I whispered brokenly.
“Katja, I will give you anything, I mean, anything, in this world just to keep you.”
“Anything?”
He nodded.
“Give me your heart.”
Trying to seduce a Sloan was like taming a wild animal. It wasn't an easy feat. But if you finally got them to give up, they would give you everything they had.Mathias Sloan's passion for life has been gone for awhile and he is just going through the motions. When an opportunity to teach piano to a student in Germany comes up, he begrudgingly takes it. But now he is finding a spark again in the presence of his new student, Katja .Unfortunately she is supposed to be off limits. An instant spark gets doused by their teacher/student relationship, but their verbal sparring only succeeds in igniting them and further fueling the fire.
But to avoid the situation Mathias does his best to be a controlled, professional teacher. But comes off as more broody, angry, mysterious, and frustrated. He is great at giving mixed signals and he has to work at maintaining his control around her.
Katja is usually the good girl, rule follower and devoted to her piano. The one time she tried to walk a bit on the wild side, it backfired. And even though Mathias has much to teach her about her craft, he is also equally distracting. But she is also strong and opinionated and Mathias tends to bring out her inner fire.
She fascinated the hell out of me. Most people backed down and cowered around me, but she stood up to me. A fire ignited in her eyes, and I realized that she was the only female that had ever stood toe to toe against me.
Their interactions are intense....feel-the-tension-in-the-air-all-the-time intense. The sexual tension and underlying need between these two just simmers and boils. There are also little sweet moments where it was easy to see that they could be good together if ever really given a fighting chance.
"The problem is that sometimes opposites don't attract. Sometimes people are so different, that instead of complementing each other they ruin one another."
Mathias has up huge walls and is a master of pushing her away. He is excellent at sabotaging things before he can get too involved or feel anything. They fuss, fight, deny, hurt each other, then separate, long for, and wish they had done things differently. She becomes a more jaded, and fearful person once she experiences how easy it is to be broken. At any given moment it seemed like one of them was trying to move forward while the other one was retreating. There were times I wanted to throttle both of them or at least lock them in a room together. He was slowly ruining Katja, just as she was ruining him when they were together, but distance did not help either. They had a connection and chemistry that could not be forgotten or tamed despite time, distance, or distractions. They both had such trouble expressing themselves, admitting the truth and realizing what they really needed.
I looked back on my time with Mathias Sloan as an experience--one that couldn't be dodged or ignored. He swept into my life like a hurricane, destroying everything in his wake.
This story spans time and two continents and is told in both points of view. Mathias has his own personal baggage to work through, but will he figure it out in time or will he end up losing her to someone safer and less likely to ruin her?
This was an angsty story of a love that was volatile, passionate, scary, and all consuming. Katja deserved love and happiness and Mathias understood that. The problem was he never thought he was good enough or could ever give her all she needed...his heart. He was definitely another stubborn Sloan brother and even more emotionally stunted than his brother Macsen. His history and disappointments in his life had done such a number on him. He was a master of denial and a complete flight risk. He was definitely a tortured hero. But I came to really like Mathias the more I got to see his inner layers and I was rooting for him to get his act together.
Speaking of Macsen, we got to visit a bit with him and Emilia(Breaking the Wrong), and also Thayer and Severine(Every Which Way). We also met the German grandparents of the brothers' and Katja. And Katja's friends Simone and Lukas were a big part of this story as well.
Through the story we saw both characters grow, change, and come into their own. It was painful, complicated, emotional, and difficult. But ultimately they had to decide if what they had together could be tamed into something healthy and fulfilling instead of destructive and toxic. It was definitely not an easy journey for either of them.
I was gifted a copy in exchange for an honest review.
Mathias Sloan, oldest brother and most withdrawn, was just as gruff and self-contained as expected. But watching him lose his cool with Katja showed a completely different side that we haven’t seen from him before. It gave a glimpse of vulnerability though he fought hard to keep a lid on that crack in his armor.
Katja was passionate about her piano. She wanted to be the best and was willing to put the time in to practice to get there. She was also a people pleaser, keeping a lid on her own passions outside her music studio. She lived quietly and according to the restrictions placed on her by her grandfather, at least until she meets Mathias.
The attraction and heart between Katja and Mathias was palpable. Their story was filled with trying to do right (or what was perceived as right) and their differing views about what that was at all.
As Mathias guided Katja’s piano lessons, the tension between them ratcheted quickly. After their epic first meeting (I love meetings like that!) they couldn’t help but carry the anticipation forward. Except that what had nearly happened was against all the rules Katja’s grandfather had set for Mathias. With every touch, every looks, every memory of that first night, the angst between them grew exponentially. And because Mathias has promised her grandfather to stay away from a relationship with Katja and he thinks Katja can do much better than him, Mathias shuts down every advance she tries to make.
For as angst-filled and drawn out as the first part of the book was, I felt like the end happened very quickly. Considering everything that was going on in Katja’s life at the time, It felt like they covered the ground between where they were and where they ended up too fast for it to make sense.
I had been waiting for this book from the time I finished Every Which Way and Breaking the Wrong, and part of me thinks I would have been pulled further and faster into this story had I read it closer to the other two. I had a bit of a hard time diving in, both because I couldn’t remember much about Mathias and because there was more angst that I usually like anymore in a book. But as I remembered more about Mathias and was drawn into their story, I felt like I needed this story to complete the Sloan brothers story.
Katja was passionate about her piano. She wanted to be the best and was willing to put the time in to practice to get there. She was also a people pleaser, keeping a lid on her own passions outside her music studio. She lived quietly and according to the restrictions placed on her by her grandfather, at least until she meets Mathias.
The attraction and heart between Katja and Mathias was palpable. Their story was filled with trying to do right (or what was perceived as right) and their differing views about what that was at all.
As Mathias guided Katja’s piano lessons, the tension between them ratcheted quickly. After their epic first meeting (I love meetings like that!) they couldn’t help but carry the anticipation forward. Except that what had nearly happened was against all the rules Katja’s grandfather had set for Mathias. With every touch, every looks, every memory of that first night, the angst between them grew exponentially. And because Mathias has promised her grandfather to stay away from a relationship with Katja and he thinks Katja can do much better than him, Mathias shuts down every advance she tries to make.
For as angst-filled and drawn out as the first part of the book was, I felt like the end happened very quickly. Considering everything that was going on in Katja’s life at the time, It felt like they covered the ground between where they were and where they ended up too fast for it to make sense.
I had been waiting for this book from the time I finished Every Which Way and Breaking the Wrong, and part of me thinks I would have been pulled further and faster into this story had I read it closer to the other two. I had a bit of a hard time diving in, both because I couldn’t remember much about Mathias and because there was more angst that I usually like anymore in a book. But as I remembered more about Mathias and was drawn into their story, I felt like I needed this story to complete the Sloan brothers story.
I was gifted a copy in exchange for an honest review.
Calia Read lives in Indiana with her husband and their four kids.
1 comments
Great Reviews as usual ladies!
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Every Which Way and Breaking the Wrong, or anything by this Author, but I have heard good things.
This one sounds interesting with the brooding hero, and the piano elements. Gotta love a good brooder, LOL