Skin Game
97. Ava Gray, Skin Game
Kyra Beckwith is a con woman with a unique gift: when she touches another person, she temporarily steals that person’s strongest ability. She mostly uses this gift to hustle lowlifes at pool, but she recently managed to pull off a huge scam against a powerful criminal and casino owner named Serrano. Outraged at Kyra’s theft of $3 million of his money, Serrano has taken out a contract on Kyra’s life, and the man he’s hired for the job is an efficient and deadly killer. Reyes has spent most of his adult life as a hit man, and he’s perfectly willing to kill his targets, since they always deserve it. When he meets Kyra, however, his gut tells him that she’s different. As he gets closer to her in order to learn where she’s stashed Serrano’s money, he also finds himself desperately wanting her. But how can he fall for a girl he’s been hired to kill?
I read Ann Agurre’s Grimspace a while back and really liked it, so I thought I would try this romance that she wrote under a pen name. Right off the bat, I was intrigued by the basic plot; the fact that Reyes is a hit man provides a legitimate obstacle to the romance between the two main characters. And romance does develop, in a fairly predictable way. At first, Kyra and Reyes just have sex (yup, lots of it), but as they spend more time together, deeper feelings emerge as well. The damaged-hero-finally-opens-his-heart-and-learns-to-love trope is pretty common, but it does work here. I also found myself very intrigued by one of the secondary characters, Addison Foster, who seemed to be more complex than the two protagonists. Of course, he’s the hero in book two of this series, and I just might have to pick up Skin Tight for his story. Overall, despite being very predictable and a bit graphic for my tastes, I enjoyed this book.