Hollywood Players Club: Marcus - Alexis Adaire

Reading Challenge Category: Free ARC from Booksprout

Official Blurb:

It’s all fun and games until things get serious… then it’s game over.
Basketball star Marcus Jennings scores just as easily off the court as on—until he meets Rashida Blanchard, a beautiful professional woman and single mother who refuses to put up with his nonsense. Can alpha-male Marcus afford to walk away from someone who sees his true potential better than he ever has?
Marcus: I’m an All-Star forward for the legendary Los Angeles Lakers, and I live for the thrill of the game and of making opponents bend to my will. Sometimes that means basketball, sometimes it means women. The world is divided between the people who appreciate what I do, and those who think I'm an asshole, but that second group can go to hell. Marcus Jennings wasn't put on this planet to make friends or keep people happy. I’m here to do what I do best: score.
Rashida: From the first moment I laid eyes on Marcus, when he walked totally naked into my life, his astounding body and devastatingly handsome features burned into my brain and refused to leave. There are two problems with me being so attracted to him, though: Marcus is the most immature jerk I've ever met, and I'm the mother of a six-year-old boy and can't afford a second childish male in my life. Someone needs to grow up fast for this to work, and I’m not talking about my child.

My Thoughts:

This is the third in the series, and I’m afraid it wasn’t my favourite. There was nothing majorly wrong with it, but I just wasn’t feeling the connection between Marcus and Rashida.
I felt like we didn’t really get to know Rashida very well. The chapters are alternated between hers and Marcus’s points of views. Her chapters were either very small or were only long when we were seeing the sex between them from her vantage point. There was just no meat behind her story. Yes, she was a single working mother, but other than that there was just nothing that made her special. Whereas in the last book, Claire was a force to be reckoned with in her own right. She had a purpose to the story, but Rashida’s sole reason for being was for Marcus to fall in love with her and change his ways.
I don’t think it helped either that the story took quite a while to get going. The two meet briefly at the beginning but then don’t really have anything to do with one another until about 25% of the way in. I actually wondered if they ever would meet again as their lives and sex expeditions were headed in totally different directions. So I didn’t feel as if there was enough time to get invested in their story as a couple.
It was great that the story that had started up in the previous book about Marcus’s career and his endorsement deals was carried on. This side of the story was well put together, but I just think Rashida and the love story needed a little more development.

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