🖤💔🔥🩰🧨🎸

Let me tell you something.

I thought I was just going to read a spicy little rockstar-meets-ballerina romance to pass the time while avoiding my responsibilities and eating string cheese in bed like a semi-feral Victorian ghost. What I got instead was an existential crisis, several spicy hallucinations, a full-blown emotional exorcism, and one (1) hot fictional man who now owns my central nervous system.

Rome Moreno? Sir, why are you built like a red flag and wrapped in emotional trauma, tattoos, and orgasmic prose? Why do I want to simultaneously slap you, marry you, and make you soup?? Why is your pain my pain? Why did my soul whisper “yes daddy” every time you opened your filthy, filthy mouth???

And Lili? My delicate broken ballerina turned quietly feral chaos goddess. I was rooting for you like my life depended on it. I wanted to scoop you out of your hyper-controlled glass tower and tuck you inside a hoodie made of emotional safety and soft carbs. But then you came for me. You did a pirouette into my chest cavity and danced all over my heart in toe shoes dipped in trauma and glitter.

Together? They are the human version of setting fire to a silk sheet with a candle during a thunderstorm while whispering “this is fine.”

The spice:
I’m sorry, I can’t even look at a guitar or a ballet barre anymore without getting flustered. I am now physically weakened by the phrase, “Do you want me to f*ck the sass out of your mouth?” I had to lay down. Twice. Rome is a menace. A menace with an oral fixation, a filthy imagination, and zero regard for my mental health. Lili is delicate like a razor blade. Together they are basically a crime against serotonin. I will never emotionally recover from the pole scene. I am haunted. I am changed. I need electrolytes.

The emotions:
This book grabbed my heart, stomped on it in Doc Martens, and then gave it CPR using dirty talk and shared trauma. I cried like I was personally involved in the storyline. Rome and Lili didn't just peel back their layers — they emotionally stripped each other down like it was foreplay and then made me watch. I felt like a third wheel at an intimate therapy session that somehow involved handcuffs.

Other notes:

If you think trauma bonding isn’t hot, this book is here to gently but aggressively prove you wrong.
The prose? POETRY. The pain? Sumptuous.
The side characters? An entire chaotic, lovable rock band found family I would sell my soul to brunch with.
If I see someone named Eloise, I will be asking if she has any emotionally devastated roommates available.
Final thoughts:
This book is a spiritual awakening, a smutty ballet, a chaotic emotional takedown disguised as a romance novel. I am unwell. I am in love. I need a support group, a cold compress, and maybe a priest.

Rating: 27/5 stars, 11/10 orgasms, 3.5 emotional breakdowns.
Highly recommended for fans of:

Sad rockstars with filthy mouths
Emotionally repressed ballerinas
Trauma that feels like foreplay
Found family chaos
Spice that makes you rethink your moral compass
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go reread every filthy quote I highlighted and pretend someone is whispering “Hey sweetheart” into my ear while I sob into my pillow.
🖤🔥🩰🎸📖💀

Rome Moreno is a bad-boy, playboy, rockstar with emotional attachment issues. Lili is a professional dancer with verbally abusive and controlling mommy. What could possibly go wrong when these two end up falling for each other? Lots of smut and a bit of character growth. I won't say that this book is the best book ever written, and I probably won't remember a thing about it in a week's time, but it was a fun time. I didn't really feel all that connected to these characters and I don't know if it's because this was book #4 in the series and I hadn't read any of the others or not. Overall, the story was good and the spicy scenes were fun!

The audio narrators Desiree Ketchum and Connor Brown do a good job with the narration.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tantor Audio for access to the ALC in exchange for an honest review.

The audiobook narration was excellent—both narrators delivered strong performances that made the listening experience enjoyable. Their voices fit the characters well, and the pacing and emotion helped bring the story to life.

Unfortunately, the story itself didn’t fully work for me. I struggled with the male lead’s personality and his repeated poor decisions, which made it hard to root for him. The female lead had potential, but her long-standing pattern of being easily controlled—and seeming oddly accepting of it—was frustrating to watch unfold. Their dynamic felt more imbalanced than romantic at times.

While the premise had promise, the character development left me wanting more. Still, if you're in it for the narration, it’s a solid listen.