Elizabeth Reyes, $3.99
Contemporary Romance, 2011
Phew, Always Been Mine is a contemporary romance featuring actual adults, which is a relief after the previous book in this series. Well, physically these characters are adults, at least.
This is a reunion romance. In the opening chapter, Valerie Zuniga spots a hot woman bringing an overnight bag over to her boyfriend Alex Moreno’s place and snaps. She has been stewing in paranoia that Alex has been cheating on her every time she blinks, and now, she thinks that she has evidence at long last. She basically screams and shrieks her way into a break-up, never listening to anything he has to say because our heroine has taken trust issues to a new level of cray cray.
Then, we cut to a year later, when Valerie is still twirling and doing her cray cray dance every time she sees Alex. She hates him! No, she wants him! Oh no, he’s in the same space as a woman – that cheating ho bag! On and on she will go until I can only wonder how Valerie manages to run around going wild all this while without someone shooting her with a tranquilizer gun.
Then, she decides to finally listen to Alex and then they’re back together. Yay, horny time! Wait, there is still a long way to go to the happy ending, looking at the page count, so the author pulls out a stalker for Valerie out of somebody’s rear end. Alex puffs up to play the hero, and he gets plenty of opportunities to do so because, despite her stalker being a deranged ex-con that texts her vaguely menacing stuff constantly, Valerie is like, oh, don’t be silly, she’ll be fine – she doesn’t need protection!
Not that Alex is any prize. That guy is borderline cray cray himself: he has Valerie watched and stalked 24/7, and he also gets very jealous each time she spends time doing work with her boss, who happens to be a man. My favorite scene is that one where he blows his gasket in front of Valerie because she dared to let her boss drive her to the hospital to see her father, who just had a stroke, without Alex’s permission. Valerie enables him by beating herself up for being the worst because she once spent a night at some guy’s place – without having sex with him, mind you – because that is, like, ugh, prostitute central.
By the time I reach the end of this one, I fear for a second that my eyes may have become permanently damaged from all that wild rolling that occurs while reading this thing. Seriously, the two main characters are melodramatic idiots, with serious trust issues and a propensity to become irrationally jealous the moment their partner dares to look for even a second at the opposite sex. Usually characters become stronger or wiser as the story progresses, but the reverse happens here. Valerie starts out irrational and ends up being a wretched imbecile, while Alex starts out rather okay only to devolve into a control freak nutcase.
Well, I’m done with this thing. Let me close the reader, open my files folder… ah, there it is, Always Been Mine, and this is me pressing the “delete” button. Ah, bliss.
