Release Blitz: Recovered by Jay Crownover

The road to recovery is full of twists and turns no matter who is in the driver’s seat.

From New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author Jay Crownover comes a standalone romance with a hero sure to keep readers up long into the night. Pick up your copy of RECOVERED for just $.99 through release week only!

It was hate at first sight......

Affton

I hated Cable James McCaffrey.

He was entitled, spoiled, a user…and an addict.

He was out of control and didn’t bother trying to hide it.

He had everything anyone could want but still seemed miserable and lost.

Every move he made, every mistake he stumbled his way through, rubbed me the wrong way. However, I couldn’t stop myself from trying to save him from himself when no one else would. In the sweltering heat of the summer, Cable taught me that having it all means nothing if you can’t have the one thing you want more than anything else.

Cable

I was obsessed with Affton Reed.

She was rigid, uptight, and no fun. There was something about her innate goodness that called to me.

She acted like she was above all the normal faults and failures that clung to the rest of us like the scent of smoke after a fire.

I was infatuated with her, but that didn’t stop me from acting like she didn’t exist.

In the scorching heat of summer, Affton taught me that there is always a way back from the brink of despair. She showed me that the trick to having it all was realizing that it was already there, in my hands. All I had to do was hold onto it.

​The road to recovery is full of twists and turns no matter who is in the driver’s seat.

5 Stars

Review by Trinette Dungee

“I thought hating Cable James McCaffrey was overwhelming. Hating him had nothing on loving him.”

To the outside world Affton Reed appeared to be standoffish, unapproachable and just plain ole snobby, but Affton has demons no one knows about; demons that caused her mother to rip their family apart, demons that took her mother away from her and demons that she recognizes in Caleb McCaffrey, demons that make her loath and detest Caleb McCaffrey.


Caleb McCaffrey was “that guy”, the guy everyone wanted to be friends with, the guy everyone wanted to party with. His family had more money than God and everyone want to be his friend…except Affton Reed. Nope, Affton wanted no parts of him and the more she ignored him the more he became obsessed with her. Affton was the only one who could see him spiraling out of control and she was the only one who dared to confront him about his addiction.


Can you say “intense”? Can you deal with or handle “intense”? If you answer “no” to either question then this is not the book for you. While the entire story wasn’t intense there were moments and those moments really did me in.


Affton watched her mother spiral out of control due to drug addiction and day after day she wished she’d been strong enough to help her or wish that there had been someone else out there strong enough to help her mother. So seeing that Caleb wasn’t just the party boy that everyone thought he was but real addict she takes it upon herself to confront him to save him from himself. Her actions set off a chain of events that to her spending a summer at Caleb’s beach house trying to keep him on the straight and narrow.


“What are your plans for the summer, Cable? You can’t party. You won’t be able to work with the random drug screens that will be thrown your way, no boss will understand you having to run out in the middle of a shift to pee in a cup. You aren’t getting ready to go off to college. So, what are you going to do with yourself? Were you planning on lying around, feeling sorry for yourself while someone else takes care of you?” Her eyebrows shot up, and a furious flush stained her cheeks hot pink. “You’ve already lived your life that way and look where it landed you. I think it’s time you figure out how to be self-sufficient.”


Affton’s a bit of a hard nut. She’s no nonsense but at times was just a little too harsh. The reality is that by helping Caleb she’s kind of coming to terms with the issues she never really resolved with her mother and she’s so down on herself because she feels like she wasn’t enough because her mom chose drugs over her. As time goes on as expected Affton starts to realize that there is so much more about Caleb than she initially thought and she starts to acknowledge the fact that it’s not just Caleb’s addiction or her need to save him from himself that attracts her to him and of course this doesn’t really sit well with her…I think this is why she lashes out so much at him. Honestly, there were some times when I thought…she’s so hard on him that she’s going to send him right back to rock bottom.


He had asked me why the someone who tried to catch him before he fell had to be me. I would die before I told him it was because it was more than his addiction that interested me. Cable James McCaffrey interested me in a way no one else ever had . . . and obviously, I hated it because I couldn’t lie to myself and say that I still hated him.


Caleb, naturally, is resentful of his summer babysitter and can’t understand why she of all people is sent to help him. Affton knows nothing about him. She thinks because of the addiction she has him all figured out but there’s so much more to him than his addiction….there’s so much more to his addiction than just his addiction.


“We were in school together for years. You never so much as looked in my direction. How is it that you ended up being the someone who intervened?” He didn’t sound mad about it. Curious and puzzled, but there was no anger in his tone.


Caleb is definitely more than what meets the eye. While he may come off as he spoiled rich kid who gets any and everything he wants nothing could be further from the truth. Caleb is kind of the “poor little rich boy”; all the money in the world but no love to go along with it. Caleb wants to be a good guy but it just seems like there’s always something getting in the way of being the person he really wants to be. He’s starved for love and attention and someone to just talked to and be himself with.


"No one wakes up one morning and decides they want to be a drug addict.” He didn’t say ‘someone like you’ doesn’t decide to be an addict. He said no one decides.


This statement from his therapist, I feel helped Caleb to really starts to get that this addiction is not unique to him it’s something that can and does happen to anyone.


In reading the synopsis, this book really wasn’t at all what I thought it was going to be. Very rarely do I read the authors notes; especially something at the beginning of the book. I’m so glad I stuck to my guns and read it after I finished. Had I read that part first I would have had a totally different reaction. I liked going in blind and feeling the shock of emotions. Like I mentioned before, it wasn’t constant intensity but there were parts that just truly shock my soul.


In the beginning I really didn’t like Affton, I just couldn’t figure out what her problem was towards him and why she was so angry toward Caleb but then something clicked and I remembered something I read in the beginning of the book.


Anyone rational would point out that I had no reason to loathe Cable the way I did. He’s never outright attacked me, embarrassed me, or victimized me. All he’d done was notice me when it was the last thing I wanted. It might not make sense to anyone, but it made perfect sense to me. I’d wanted to hide, but he had no trouble finding me. In my mind, that made him my enemy from day one.


And then it made total sense to me. Affton was so full of pain that she didn’t know how to deal with, that she didn’t want ANY attention from anyone and that one day when she first moved to the small Texas town…the boy everyone wanted to notice them, noticed her. She wanted to be invisible. Maybe this is taking a little deeper than intended but I think, even though this was way before Caleb started is downward spiral and he knew nothing about her mother’s death, I think he recognized a wounded soul in Affton, the hurt she hadn’t dealt with from her mother’s death.
One of the most heartbreaking moments for me….


“Some souls were never meant to be saved. They might end up on the right path, but without fail, they will veer off. It’s all they know how to do. No matter how badly they might be hurting other people, they still lose their way. Honestly, the hurt they cause will never compare to how much hurt they inflict upon themselves.” He lifted his hand to the center of his chest and dug the heel of his palm into the place where his heart sat. He was trying to hold back whatever that tender place inside of him was bleeding out.


I have to say I really liked the way this book was wrapped up. It wasn’t quickly wrapped up with a nice little bow; it took it’s time getting to the end and for me it ended in a very familiar place with Jay’s books that made it feel like a homecoming. This was such a departure from her other books that I almost forgot I was reading one of her's. This was most definitely an emotional rollercoaster of a read and worth every minute.

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EXCERPT:

I took another swallow of cinnamon-flavored booze and made a face as it burned down my throat. Maybe I could breathe fire. I needed to be able to if I was going to make it through the summer with Affton Reed looking over my shoulder. She had some of the strongest shields I’d ever seen. If my fire wasn’t hot enough, it would bounce off her and burn me to a crisp.

The sun was down, and I was pretty much sitting in the water now. I thought about lying down and letting it lift me up and carry me wherever it wanted. I wasn’t drifting anywhere good on my own. I heard splashing and felt the air behind me stir. No longer alone. No longer left to my own devices and bad choices.

I took another swig from the bottle, draining it, and looked over my shoulder at the girl making her way toward me. Her hair looked silver in the darkening light, and there was no mistaking the annoyance on her unmade-up face. She looked at me then shifted her gaze to the empty bottle in my hand. Her lips pulled into a frown, and her eyebrows tugged down into an angry V over the top of her nose.

“You aren’t going to make anything about this summer easy, are you, Cable?”

I had a thing for her voice. It was a little bit husky and a lot sweet with that slow, southern Texas twang in it. The way my name sounded when she said it, all exasperated and frustrated, was fucking sexy. It made me wonder what it would sound like when she whispered it in the dark while I was inside of her. I’d imagined that more times than I could count over the last eighteen months.

“I don’t really do easy, Reed.” I looked at the empty bottle in my hand and contemplated tossing it into the Gulf. Knowing my luck, I’d hit some endangered marine life and give the judge one more reason to add months onto my sentence. Instead, I reached up and handed it to the leggy blonde who was now standing next to me, the water well above her ankles.

“Jesus. Did you drink this whole thing?” She sounded incensed, and when I rolled my eyes up to look at her, it was clear she was contemplating hitting me over the head with the very weapon I’d just handed to her.

I shrugged. “Pretty much.” The bubbly teen girls barely had the chance to put a dent in it before I swooped in and snagged their stash.

She sighed from where she was hovering above me. I jolted in shock when she suddenly lowered herself to the wet sand next to me, the water immediately soaking into her frayed cutoffs and swirling around her ankles and hips as she copied my pose, my empty bottle caught between her feet. She leaned forward, rested her cheek on her knee, and gazed at me steadily out of those mesmerizing eyes. “I tried to tell your mother this was hopeless. I warned her there is no helping someone who doesn’t want to be helped. I don’t want to be here, Cable.” Her voice was hard, and I was surprised that her admission hurt a little bit. I didn’t want to be around me most of the time, but I was used to other people flocking to me, vying for my attention. “I don’t want to be here, but I have to be, so that means you’re stuck with me no matter how difficult you decide to make the next couple of months. I don’t have a choice.”

I wanted a cigarette. I needed something to occupy my hands and my mouth. I’d left the smokes and m y t-shirt on the steps of the deck off dad’s house. The steps led to the beach, just a few feet from the water. It was a beautiful house on a prime piece of property. With Affton here, it was nothing more than an expensive jail cell.

I knew exactly what means my mother had gone to in order to get Affton to agree to this madness. She told me outright she was blackmailing my former classmate, I think in a thinly veiled attempt to make me care about someone else’s future if I wouldn’t care about my own. I knew if I drove Affton away, her father would lose his job. It wasn’t fair, but my mom had been nothing short of ruthless in her pursuit of my sobriety. “My mom can be very convincing when she puts her mind to it.” She could also be tough as nails and immovable when she wanted something.

Affton snorted and shifted so her chin was resting on her knee instead of her cheek. She looked out over the endless landscape of water and sky, and I shivered even though it wasn’t cold. I lifted a hand to run it through my hair. My unease lived inside of me, crawled all around my bones and under my skin. I wasn’t used to it making its way to the surface because of someone else. There was a lot unsaid between me and this girl. The few words we’d exchanged were powerful, important ones that hung heavy between us. It was so much easier when I looked at her, and she refused to look back.

“I don’t think convincing is the word I would use…more like conniving. Either way, she tied my hands, so succeed or fail, you are stuck with me until the end of summer. Let’s get you into the house so you can sleep this bottle off and pray you don’t get popped for a piss test tomorrow.” She grabbed the bottle from where she had plunked the base in the sand and lifted a pale eyebrow at me. “You should have picked something…” she trailed off and gave me a shrug. “Less wussy to enjoy your last binge with. This stuff tastes like toothpaste.”

She offered me her free hand, and for a second all I could picture was grabbing it and pulling her under with me, letting the water cover us both and take us somewhere we would both rather be. I didn’t. I took her hand and struggled to my feet. Months of forced sobriety tumbled away under the wash of cinnamon whiskey. I wobbled and almost went back down, but before I could nose dive into the shallow water, Affton was there, arm around my waist, empty bottle pressed into my side, a chilly reminder that I’d already fucked this up and it was only the first day.

I had no idea how either one of us was going to survive the summer, and if we did, I had no idea how I was supposed to survive beyond that when I was once again left to my own devious and duplicitous devices.

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About Jay Crownover:

Jay Crownover is the international and multiple New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Marked Men Series, The Saints of Denver Series, the Point Series, the Breaking Point Series, and the Getaway Series. Her books can be found translated in many different languages all around the world. She is a tattooed, crazy haired Colorado native who lives at the base of the Rockies with her awesome dogs. This is where she can frequently be found enjoying a cold beer and Taco Tuesdays. Jay is a self-declared music snob and outspoken book lover who is always looking for her next adventure, between the pages and on the road.

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