Shelter for Sophie by Susan Stoker

Title: Shelter for Sophie

Author: Susan Stoker

Series: #8 in the Badge of Honor: Texas Heroes series

Genre: Romantic Suspense 

Publisher: Stoker Aces Production LLC (August 15, 2017)

Source: Kindle Freebie

Rating: ☕☕1/2

Synopsis: She’s shy, he’s stoic…not the hardest personality traits to overcome, but Sophie Carson and Roman “Chief” Proudfit have their work cut out for them.

Sophie has a crush on the silent-but-studly firefighter next door. She’s been pining away silently while secretly helping the hardworking man by mowing his lawn—which he thinks is being done by her nonexistent husband and/or boyfriend. He’s definitely not big on neighborly chitchat, but with her stutter, that suits Sophie just fine. But now a misunderstanding at a bar has put him even further out of her reach.

Roman’s difficult upbringing on an Indian reservation is a sore spot, so when he thinks Sophie is taking advantage of poor people for medical trials at her workplace, he lets her know exactly what he thinks. But when he discovers he misunderstood, he’s man enough to admit it…and also that he should have opened his eyes to his beautiful, sensitive neighbor sooner.

As the couple gets closer, each helping the other overcome lifelong pains, for the first time in years, Roman has something to live for other than his job. And, as he discovers when Sophie puts herself in danger, something even bigger to lose…

** Shelter for Sophie is the 8th book in the Badge of Honor: Texas Heroes Series. Each book is a stand-alone, with no cliffhanger endings.

My Thoughts:  While I didn't fault the actual writing of the book (this being my first Susan Stoker book) I just had issues with the story. The characters were perfect. Sophie was beautiful with white, blond hair and blue eyes and Chief kept mentioning she looked like an angel. She helped underprivileged people, befriended the homeless, and mowed her neighbor's yard. To make her not perfect Stoker gave her a stutter. To make it even more annoying there was so much dialog with her stuttering her s's and m's in every line. Anyway, I really got tired of both the H and h being so perfect. Their relationship was even perfect. The relationship was really quite sweet, so it was startling when Chief dropped the F bomb. It just felt gratuitous, and I certainly wasn't expecting the pretty spicy sex scene with dirty talking. With sweet on sweet the spicy bits were jarring.

One last thing for a book with a Native American main character giving him a nickname of Chief is in bad taste. He's a firefighter but not the fire chief so the nickname makes no sense. Oh, but it must be ok because he said the nickname didn't offend him. Ugh!

In a Nutshell: Ok for a book that I really didn't like I'm not sure why I'm intrigued to carry on with the series. I love me some fire fighters and the skill in the writing sucked me in but make no mistake this book wasn't good.