Unexpected Reality by Kaylee Ryan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Expect the unexpected. That’s what they say, but it’s easier said than done.
How do you expect a change so huge it rocks you to your core?
How do you prepare yourself for an event that will alter your life forever?
One breath
One second
One minute
One hour
One day at a time, you learn to live with your unexpected reality.Unexpected Reality
A different kind of surprise baby romance!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🖤💙❤️💚
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍
Character development: 🙂🥰☺️😂😀
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Dual Narration
The Hero: Ridge Beckett – he owns Beckett Construction, and he works with his four best buddies. He and his friends are huge players with the ladies. Ridge went through a bit of a dry spell after a hot night with a girl named Melissa who ghosted him in the middle of the night. Though that was fine with him since he doesn’t date, he is a one and done kind of guy.
The Story: One night when he is out with the guys, his friends bet him $400 and bragging rights that he can’t be with one woman for three months. They pick the woman, a blonde girl named Stephanie. Though dating is against all his rules, he agreed to the bet so follows through. He spends about one night a week with her, though he promised her he wouldn’t be with anyone else while seeing her.
Ridge isn’t very nice to Stephanie when he is with her, though in other ways, he is a pretty nice guy. Nice enough to stop in a rainstorm to help a girl whose car broke down, then stop at an accident to help someone who rolled their car into a ditch. He doesn’t know it at that moment, but the girl who has to get cut out of the car is Melissa and Ridge finds out later that she is pregnant and has named him as her next of kin. Before he knows it, Ridge is a father to a newborn baby boy.
The heroine: Kendall – She is a nurse who works at a pediatrician’s office, she recently returned to her hometown. She had been dating a doctor where she used to live and when they broke up, she couldn’t shake him, so moving home came at the right time. She has known Ridge and his sister Reagan for a while as they went to high school together. Ridge and his friends were the dreamy guys of the school who all the girls wanted.
This was a different sort of romance in that the heroine didn’t enter the book until the tenth chapter. Though the prologue and the first nine chapters weren’t just a quick setup of the backstory, they were story in and of themselves and pretty good at that. I also liked the fact that though the baby’s mother died, Ridge was never in love with her, so he didn’t have to go through a grieving period.
I liked the fact that the book showed how hard it is to be a single parent. Even if you have money and a family that will help you, the day to day is not easy. The scene where the baby wakes up with a poopy diaper that got all over the place was terrific. They both ended up dirty and Ridge had to shower with baby Knox before trying to get them both all together, pack up all the baby stuff and get to work on time was classic. I remember those days.
The relationship between Kendall and Ridge evolved gradually and I liked the fact that their romance developed naturally. I also was happy with how nice Ridge was with Kendall, and he grew as a man after he got the baby. He and his friends were so much like frat boys at the start of the book, and he gave no thought to how he treated Stephanie, even though she wasn’t that great either.
This audiobook was told in dual points of view via dual narration and was narrated by Callie Dalton and Teddy Hamilton. Teddy Hamilton is one of my favorite male narrators. He has a great voice, which is deep yet soft and he always sounds so natural. Callie Dalton has an ok voice, though not one of my favorites. Though she does sound genuine, not like she is reading, which is good.
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