Trouble on Tap by Avery Flynn Series: Sweet Salvation Brewery #3
Published by Avery Flynn on June 12th 2015
Pages: 192
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What fun is life without a little bit of trouble? Retired supermodel and forever wild child Olivia Sweet is nothing but trouble. The youngest Sweet triplet is back in her hometown, but instead of a triumphant return it's a parade of humiliations. She's broke, homeless and dealing with the fallout from her scumbag ex-boyfriend publishing naked pictures of her to a revenge porn website. Staid and stalwart veteran Mateo Garcia has seen more trouble than a man ever should in his lifetime. He's gone from pretty boy Marine to a small town police chief with a chip on his shoulder and scars covering the left side of his face. Now his former lover, Olivia, is back in town and living next door. When the two are forced to work together to fix up the crumbling veterans' center, the sparks fly between the beauty and the man who sees himself as a beast. Not everyone is happy that Olivia is back home though and Mateo has to choose between the town who wants her gone and an uncertain future with a woman who he thinks could never love him...
Olivia and Mateo have history – of the hot and steamy kind. But an over-confident Mateo chucked Olivia away when she wanted more three years ago and shortly after, a horrific accident turned him from callous cad to grouchy, scarred arse who does everything in his power to turn everyone from him. Back in her hometown with her tail between her legs, even Olivia has her limits when it comes to his god-awful behaviour. But as volatile as their relationship is, you get the sense that tipping point isn’t far away and that maybe…just maybe…love just can’t quite conquer all after all.
‘Trouble on Tap’ certainly packs the biggest emotional punch of all three books, providing more nuanced insights into Olivia and Mateo that make this book more enthralling than Miranda’s or Natalie’s stories. But I thought the emotional scales were tipped in Olivia’s favour; Avery Flynn writes in a way that draws the reader’s sympathies to her, whether incidentally or not. But that was achieved a little too well, because I felt Mateo acted like an underserving arse for three-quarters of the story and hadn’t really done much at the end to counter the hurt he’d dished out to Olivia over the past three years.
With the obligatory big moment of revelation that most male leads have in this genre after someone knocks sense into them, why then, weren’t these revelatory thoughts made privy and publicly known to Olivia in his haste to win her back? With an ending that seemed glossed over, the Sweets’ collective HEA was just merely satisfactory, maybe because I was still waiting for some indication that Olivia had gotten (with surety) what she really deserved
