This review originally appeared at Seductive Musings
Review: Everything For Us by M. Leighton
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for an honest review at SeductiveMusings.blogspot.com.
Everything For Us is the conclusion to the Bad Boys trilogy and is in no way a stand-alone book. This review contains significant spoilers for Down to You and Up to Me, the first two books in the series.
Everything For Us picks up not long after the rescue of Marissa, Olivia’s cousin who had been kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity in the previous book, Up to Me. After all the suspense, violence and exposed secrets in the first two Bad Boys books, this conclusion to the story of Cash and Nash Davenport is almost sedate by comparison.
Identity is an ongoing theme in this trilogy, where we were first led to believe that Cash and Nash were twin brothers, half-orphaned by the Russian mobsters who had killed their mother and gotten their father sent to prison for her murder. When we found out that Cash was posing as his dead brother Nash, it was obviously quite a surprise. But then we found out later on that Nash was actually still alive, and ready for revenge against everyone who had ruined his life and destroyed his family. Meanwhile Olivia had fallen for Cash at the same time he was still also posing as Nash, and her cousin Marissa was dating the person she thought was Nash when it was really Cash.
It really isn’t as confusing as it sounds when you try to explain it, but suffice it to say that in this third book, all the identity switching becomes the linchpin for what happens between Marissa and Nash, and how the threat from the Russian mobsters is eventually neutralized once and for all.
Marissa’s problem has always been that she was the rich snooty one who had been groomed by her equally rich and snooty father to think only of what was best for her family’s financial and political aspirations. She treated everyone she considered her inferior with thinly veiled contempt, including her cousin Olivia, with thinly veiled contempt. What Marissa didn’t realize is that the person she thought was Nash was dating her solely as cover so that nobody would suspect he was actually someone else.
Nash has returned to help rescue Marissa and reclaim the life his brother had been living for him over the past seven years. What he didn’t anticipate was that the part of that life he ended up wanting to claim most was Marissa herself. But Nash still has one big secret left unrevealed, one that has the power to end a relationship with Marissa once she knows the full truth.
Although Everything For Us is a satisfying conclusion to the complicated plot involving the Davenport brothers and the Russian mob, it just didn’t have the same driving force behind it for me as much as the previous books in the trilogy. After all the twists and turns that came before it, this conclusion to the story was almost anticlimactic by comparison. It’s as if the first two were the crazy rollercoaster ride and the third was the slow straight glide down to the end of the line. There is a lot of interesting character development for both Marissa and Nash, and their intimate scenes together are smoking hot and full of emotional depth. But the sense of danger was gone, and that made this book just an okay read for me.
Ratings:
Overall: 3
Sensuality level: 3