My Thoughts: Tate Cooper is visiting her mom in a retirement home in Florida when she meets gorgeous but completely unsuitable James Bowen, son of her mom’s middle-aged nemesis neighbour.

With the sun right behind him, she still couldn’t see him clearly, so she shaded her eyes with her hand and faced the jerk. The jerk was gorgeous.

Tate considers James perfectly unsuitable for anything romantic related as he has several tattoos, and Tate knows very well that tattoos mean bad boy, which means irresponsible, dangerous, heartbreaker, bad-news-guy.

Duh. What was she thinking asking such a stupid question? Of course no girlfriend. These guys never had girlfriends; they had babes, bootie calls, fuck buddies.

“Disliking tattoos is like a Pavlovian reflex for me.”

She came to this conclusion through the numerous and always badly ending experience of her sister Elle, who has something for irresistible macho bad biker boys, but who each and every single time got her heart broken. So witnessing her sister’s romantic misfortunes Tate swears off tattoo-sporting guys, because she knows very well they are the kind with whom a sensible intelligent woman never mixes, unless she wants to screw up her life and sanity. I very much enjoyed reading Tate’s monologue-analysis of bad boys, even if she sounded somehow snobbish Elle Aycart wrote these potentially insulting parts in such a way that with James I found it entertaining and at times even amusing. (I have to confess but in mere whispers that I also shared some of her prejudices.)

But after Tate admits to herself that the attraction between James and herself is too much to resist she finally gives in with the reassuring thought that whatever they will have will be nothing more than a fling, just sex, nothing else.

she was after vacation fun and sex. No love, no commitment or long-term anything. James was…hormonal relief—fucking material.

And that’s where More Than Meets the Ink went from hot to scorching! The chemistry and make out scenes between James and Tate made my Kindle burst up in flames! Elle Aycart did an amazing job portraying James, who despite his impressive muscled physique and several tattoos is deep down an honest and generous good guy, but still retained some of the sexiness of bad boys in their bedroom antics.

Let me come over, and I’ll prove it to you. You’ll come so many times you’ll be limp by the time I’m done with you.”

James bedroom talk was blunt, sometimes even a bit shocking in its vulgarity, but I have to tell youo it worked amazingly well! I thought I wasn’t someone who enjoyed this kind of crude dirty talk, but James makes it really sexy! Reading their make out scenes I continuously went from getting goosebumps then fanning myself, Elle Aycart masterfully mixed sexual tension and release giving the reader the perfect concoction of sizzling scenes.

Despite being a strong and independent woman, inside Tate is very vulnerable. She lost half of her family recently and she still hasn’t gotten over her loss. She is in a fragile place of her life, with the family business being in bad shape, having debts up to her ear, having to deal with her broken up and grieving family as well as an irritating stalker. She is not ready emotionally to open up to someone, least of all to a bad boy she considers James to be. But what made my heart melt was that James knew quite early what he wanted (=Tate in his life) and wouldn’t give up. He gave as much space and time to Tate as he could, but always waiting at the end for her to finally get on board. His possessiveness and the intensity of his feelings towards Tate made him a wonderful and completely irresistible hero:

He grabbed her by her shoulders, looking ready to strangle her. “You haven’t gotten the dynamics of our relationship down yet, have you? Let me explain it to you: we’re involved, very involved. You’re mine, and your problems are also mine. No one messes with what belongs to me. Don’t fight me on that, because you’ll lose, baby.

Besides the amazingly hot and well orchestrated love scenes, I mostly cherished the constant humour in More Than Meets the Ink. Be it Tate or James’ dad, every character had some lines which made me burst out in laughter:

“I’m going to take a wild guess here and say the hard-on you’ve been sporting all afternoon is not on account of Mr. Nicholson continually bending over to pick up the golf balls, right?”