
Series: The Intelligence Unit, #4, #4
Published by Kimberly Kincaid Romance on 10th May 2022
Pages: 262
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The scars that cut deepest are the ones beneath the surface…
Detective Addison Hale is a survivor. The armor she uses to hide her scars keeps her safe on the job, and holding people at arm’s length is a small price to pay when there’s a stalker on the loose.Especially since he’s after the sister of impulsive firefighter Ryan Dempsey, who she had a scorching-hot fling with two months ago.
The fling she can’t forget, even though she knows how dangerous it is to get close.
To feel.
Ryan will do anything to keep his sister safe, even if it means he has to play by Addison’s rules. But when the stalker sets his sights on the smart, sexy detective, Ryan finds he’ll do anything for her, including risk his life to fight at her side.
But this enemy is as cunning as he is deadly and he’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants.Addison and Ryan must outrun the shadows and outwit a killer.
No matter the cost.
‘The Rogue’ is actually a follow up to a very brief stint that tells of the one-nighter both Addison Hale and Ryan Dempsey had a few months ago, until she ghosted him the morning after–where their second-chance sort of comes after a Ryan’s sister encounters a psychotic and very, very dangerous stalker.
The case itself is a simple but slippery one: the perp in question is slick and sly, knows the right words to say and how to shield his identity, throw the whole case of characters for a loop as they try to build a case against him. Proximity to the case and each other means that Ryan/Addison can once again get close…and see where this might lead them the second time around.
I liked Ryan and Addison as individual characters and even thought they were capable and pretty well-rounded as protagonists. Kimberly Kincaid definitely threw some role reversal into the mix here with the opposites-attracting kind of vibe: Ryan being the impulsive, emotive one, while Addison was the commitment-phobe who needed to learn to let people who cared past those walls of hers.
Yet as a pairing, I struggled to see the chemistry together or gotten the sense that they needed each other past this case, even if their relationship was certainly written as distant-friends first, then a sudden lust that turned to love which I had a little harder bit of a time believing perhaps. In fact, I kept on reading because of the suspense–while not trying to be weird about it–but the case took my interest first, followed by a relationship that I thought was lukewarm at best. It’s not in any way a slight to Kincaid’s writing clearly, but just wasn’t feeling too much for this particular pairing.