No love, no affection, just SLAM YOU AGAINST THE DOOR AND SHOVE MY TONGUE DOWN YOUR THROAT kind of sex. Ilya’s father is an awful person, but we also see him forgetting things and just…his decline with Alzheimer’s, and the stress and struggle this puts on Ilya having to deal with all this is a LOT. First, I just want to say that I have been completely blown away and giddy over the love and support Heated Rivalry has received since its release in March.

Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Of course Ilya and Shane are not always in the same city and at times author shows them separately and maybe I am misreading the narrative, but I felt like most of the time she did it to make a point – to show that their connection was strengthening that they were thinking about each other. The sex was fast and swift but the feelings build and build over time, so much so that I had tears in my eyes by the end. The chapter ended there, and while the next started with them playing video games (think FIFA but the hockey version), it later turns into them having sex. In the prologue, Shane mentions that Ilya has a broken nose and his teeth have gotten replaced quite a few times throughout their hockey career by then, but not once does any of that actually come up in the story as we progress through and see their relationship play out during that time?I understand this is rivals with benefits to lovers, but sex being the primary plot device for the actual 50% of the story and later being used in between scenes for the rest of the story makes it weak. Now that he’s captain of the Montreal Voyageurs, he won’t let anything jeopardize that, especially the sexy Russian whose hard body keeps him awake at night.

It’s impressive and for that so incredibly romantic that they held on to that impossible thing between them for all these years. Then the story takes us back to their teen years before they go to the NHL and we see their relationship develop over the years. In this case, with the repeated and constant sex in this, even the plot wasn't able to make up for it. I loved how they let each other in for the first time on moments from their shared past they never talked about before.I have read multiple stories that have characters with accents, but the accents have never been so well-written that they carry over to the voice in my head like his did.

We meet Shane and Ilya in their current messed up situation and then it jumps back in time to them being teenage rookies and just meeting.I didn’t keep track of how many sex scenes there are, but there are 15 (I got this from Alisa’s review).

It had been a long while for me since I was so smitten by erotic romance and I am so glad somebody else was too . although they had a lot of back and forth through majority of this book + time skips, i felt their connection.If I didn’t know book 6 was going to be a sequel for the Shane and Ilya, I would have liked this book even less.