FLIRTING WITH FIRE by Piper Rayne

From USA Today bestselling duo Piper Rayne comes the first romantic comedy in the Blue Collar Brothers trilogy,
Flirting with Fire

Everyone knows that if you play with fire you’ll end up getting burned…

What happens when you attend a first responder’s bachelor auction with your best friends? Well, if your name is Madison Kelly like me, your friends end up bidding on a date for you with your high school crush.

That’s right. Even back when I was ‘Fatty Maddie’ to all my classmates, I had eyes for the quarterback of our football team. Not like I was the only one.

Mauro Bianco may fight fires for a living, but he still sets my heart ablaze. One look at the rugged, muscular man he’s turned into and I want to slide down his pole.

One date. That’s all I’m committed to. A few hours and I can tuck him back into that tattered old shoebox in my closet.

As always, the universe has other plans. I never would’ve predicted that in a matter of days he’d turn from my dream guy into my enemy.

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Narrated by Kylie Stewart and Eric Rolon, start listening to
Flirting with Fire

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5-Stars ~ Reviewed by Emma-Louise on behalf of KFF

Madison Kelley what a relatable character she is. Any reader out there can relate to her self-conscientiousness. So many women see themselves as fat and unattractive. Scars from childhood still run deep in adulthood even though she is no longer the brace-wearing wallflower she was in high school.

Flirting with Fire starts with our awkward and scared Maddie going to a bonfire party with her best friend Lauren, I should have said dragged to. Lauren was not taking no for an answer. At the bonfire party, Maddie bumps into her high school crush a very handsome boy by the name of Mauro Bianco. She worships the ground he walks on and he doesn’t even know she exists. Great start, right? But wait! This doesn’t go the way you think it will, the rest of the prologue left me positively enraptured. And this is as much as I’m saying about that part of the book.

Fast forward nine years and Madison is working as a house flipper when she comes across Mauro Bianco. Again, not all of the story, but I can’t and I won’t give any more than this away. From here there is a tentative friendship. Does Maddie still hold a torch for Mauro?

The romance and heat were sweet and off the charts. Mauro is a true gentleman. There is a little cheese factor in the romance but I can’t emphasize how much it does not wreck this book. Sometimes a gal likes a bit of cheese with her romance and some of it was just so truly adorable. It made me grin like a mad woman, which is not easy to achieve.

‘Somewhere between the butterflies roaring into an uncontrollable flutter in my stomach and all my sensory alarms flashing overload, we sink into one another. Our mouths colliding one second, gentle the next.’

Throw in a little suspense and mystery; Mauro is a firefighter and there have been several suspicious fires that may or may not have been arson. A dead fireman results from one of these fires leaving the entire station thrown through a loop. Why would anyone set fires specifically to injure firemen? I had a few suspicions about this whole little storyline, but was I right or not? Read the book and find out.

“Just listen to the lyrics of the song, okay? It says everything I want to on this night.”

Being the first in a new series, you’re well aware that secondary characters you meet will eventually have their story told. This is the case in this book. The secondary characters, i.e. Maddie’s best friends are larger than life. As a former wallflower, I can understand why Maddie stepped back so much with them both. Both Lauren and Vanessa could be intimidating and tenacious, especially in their love of their friend Maddie.

The authors have stated that the Bianco brothers have been in previous books, as a rather new reader of this dynamic duo I have not had the opportunity yet. Emphasis on yet! It takes a lot in a book to have me sitting for hours on end. I picked this one up and ended up getting to fifty-eight percent before I knew what had happened, and this isn’t a short book.

I cannot wait to see how Crush on the Cop goes. Will some of the questions have been answered or will I just get more questions to add to my already growing list? Whatever it is, these authors have they have it in spades.

EXCERPT

© 2018 Piper Rayne
All rights reserved.

We fell in love. Then our world fell apart. I wished so hard for Cole Danforth. And one day, he came true. He was my first boyfriend, my first lover, my first and only love. He should also have been my last. But in a split-second, we were ripped apart, our lives broken, my heart shattered. After ten years, I’ve returned to my hometown, the place of my greatest joy and darkest pain. Cole is still here, but the beautiful boy I’d loved is gone. Now he’s a ruthless, unforgiving man determined to feed both my resentment and my lust. Then our torturous past encroaches again, trapping us in a violent storm. But this time, there is no escape.
My brothers widen their stances, share a look of amusement and cock their eyebrows at me.“Hate to break it to you, but Maddie didn’t bid on you. Lauren did.” Luca laughs while Cristian chuckles.“I’m going out with Madison and she didn’t go to our high school. Which reminds me.” I pull out my phone.“Maddie is Madison, you idiot,” Luca says. “Her and Lauren were my year.”“I went to high school with Madison?” I try to let her face come back to me, and though I can picture her bright blue eyes and long chestnut hair, nothing about her is familiar from high school.“Yes, but she definitely wasn’t hanging out at the bonfires and football pep rallies.” Luca grabs his helmet off his bike. The only responsible thing I’ve seen him do in the last few years.“Well, shit and she doesn’t even want to go out with me? Her friend bid on me?”Luca straddles his bike with a grin. I look over to Cristian, but he’s putting his shirt back on and starts fiddling with his earbuds. They obviously think this conversation is over.“Yeah, but we’re all in the same boat.” Cristian’s thumb moves over his phone screen. “Maddie’s awesome and I think you’ll have a good time with her.”“She seemed pretty quiet and way too accommodating,” I say.Luca kicks his stand up, letting the bike rock a little under him.Cristian’s hands freeze on the screen of his phone. “And that’s bad?” he asks.“I want a woman who knows what she wants. Has her own damn opinions. Doesn’t just agree with everything I say.”

Cristian peeks over his shoulder, a look of amusement that matches Luca’s. “You want a girl to come up and grab your nuts?”

“I want a girl who knows what her favorite food is, has an opinion about where she wants to go for dinner, likes whatever sports team she likes and doesn’t default to my favorites.” I stuff my hands into my pockets, digging out my keys for my truck.

“Well then, Maddie might not be the one. Like I said, she’s nice.” Cristian slaps me on the shoulder. “Treat her good though, okay?” He inserts one earbud.

“What do you think I’m going to do, leave her in Garfield Park?”

He puts his other earbud in. “That’s not even funny man. I have a friend in that district and the shit that goes down there…” He shakes his head.

Cristian loses the entire point of my statement—the fact I’m not a jackass. I’m not Luca.

“It’s one date,” I say. “And who knows, maybe she’s nice but still has a wild streak.”

Christian again glances over to Luca who’s smiling like he’s fucking Mickey Mouse.

“Well, good luck on your date,” he says.

Cristian jogs away and Luca’s bike starts up.

I head to my truck.

The conversation is over, but I’m curious now.

Where’s my damn yearbook?

Piper Rayne, or Piper and Rayne, whichever you prefer because we’re not one author, we’re two. Yep, you get two USA Today Bestselling authors for the price of one. Our goal is to bring you romance stories that have “Heartwarming Humor With a Side of Sizzle” (okay…you caught us, that’s our tagline). A little about us… We both have Kindles full of one-clickable books. We’re both married to husbands who drive us to drink. We’re both chauffeurs to our kids. Most of all, we love hot heroes and quirky heroines that make us laugh, and we hope you do, too.

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