Forbidden Little Game (Crimson College Book 4)

Sweet sweet Noah! Gosh, he was so sweet and broke my heart a little bit with his struggles. Torin was the best. I absolutely loved him. He fell HARD and he was so overprotective of Noah that I was eating it up. I am SO EXCITED about the MMC for the next book. I need it ASAP lol

Even though I still think book 3 is the strongest in the series, I had a really good time with Forbidden Little Game. It didn’t hit the same as “Reckless,” but it kept me invested. Noah has been an interesting character since book 1, so I was happy to finally get to know more about him, his motivations, and see him grow, confront some of his toxic past habits, and make an effort to be better. It gave his arc more depth and made his story more engaging. Torin, on the other hand, didn’t work for me nearly as well. I wanted to connect with him more than I did, but something about his storyline felt all over the place, and because of that, I never fully clicked with his POV. He wasn’t a bad character, but compared to Noah, he just didn’t feel as emotionally compelling to me. I do have to say, I like the stepbrothers trope and it works here. The relationship feels believable enough within the world of the story, and the chemistry between them is very strong. There is a lot of tension, and the spicy scenes were probably some of the strongest parts of the book. That’s something this author does really well across the whole series. My main issue is something I’ve felt with the previous books too: there’s just so much going on around the main story that it starts to feel noisy. There are a lot of side threads, extra conflicts, and little plot points fighting for attention, but not all of them feel fully developed or properly tied up by the end. Because of that, the central…

Noah and Torin were oil and water, fire and ice, hating and avoiding each other for 4 years as their parents had a working relationship, then a romance, and finally a marriage, making the two stepbrothers, a situation neither welcomed. For four years each had harbored resentment for the other, believing the misconceptions each had in their head about the other. Torin believed Noah to be a spoiled rich kid, in college but spending much of his time drinking and sleeping around, aimless without a direction of what he wanted to do or be when he graduated. Noah’s reputation preceded him on campus, even though he had recently left that behind him, trying to change, but Torin didn’t know that. Noah believed Torin was this guy who had skills and could do everything, had a killer body constantly showing off without his shirt, and with a personal mission to do charitable work and save the environment and the people in it. Torin would attend all of his father’s charitable functions, and was this confident, had-it-together person which Noah could not compete with nor ever be. Even so, there was a connection between them that was a constant push-pull, a challenge to meet and one up each other, never really stopping long enough to see the real person underneath. Things came to a head in the weeks after the wedding when Torin ended up on Noah’s university campus, living in his frat house while taking summer classes. Noah tried to ignore him, but Torin enjoyed setting Noah off, so they…