Review: Lovely Trigger (Tristan & Danika # 3) by R.K. Lilley

THE IMPACT

Tristan hit rock bottom, and no one felt the impact harder than Danika. She was forced to see, in the most brutal of ways, that love does not conquer all. Bruised, bloody, and broken she had to walk away.

THE AFTERMATH

Picking up the pieces of your life after a tragedy is a daunting prospect, and that’s considering you still own all of the pieces. But what if you don’t? What if someone else owns those pieces, and those pieces are a part of your soul?

You dig deep and work with what you’ve got. 

That’s what Danika told herself and believed, every single day, for years. 

Tristan and Danika’s love had failed every test that life had thrown at them. She couldn’t forget that, not for one second. And if those tests had been overly harsh, well, she wasn’t one to wallow in self-pity. The failure was the thing she had to focus on. The failure was the lesson. She had no intention of working so hard to make it out of hell without learning that lesson well. 

He’d set me adrift, so very long ago, and I had wandered into deepest waters, with depths far too vast for me to navigate alone.
And here he was, swimming out to save me. Had he been following me all the while? Had I been so blind?

What a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. It was emotional, angsty, erotic, everything you would want in a book. I waited until book 3 was out to read the 2nd and ended up reading them back to back.

In Lovely Trigger we find Danika slowly begin to pick up the pieces of her broken heart and shattered dreams. She has a job at James Cavendish’s art gallery, and while she can’t dance anymore, she gets by. As much as she tries to move on emotionally, she can never seem to fully forget the man that will always hold her heart.

I convinced myself that it had all been passion, not true love.  True love was a myth, a misdirection from the solid things in life.  What I’d felt for Tristan had been big and all consuming, but I told myself, like a mantra in my head, that it had never been solid.   Even so, every little thing brought him to mind.  We’d had too much together, been through too much, felt too much, and every feeling had a memory.

She tries to move on, but no one ever compares to Tristan.

Tristan is dealing with his own demons. After hitting rock bottom, he’s slowly but surely trying to climb his way out. He’s gotten clean, a job as a magician in the Cavendish casino, but still the memory of Danika haunts him. He’s riddled with guilt; for the things that he remembers and the things that he doesn’t recall from his drugged out haze. Just reading about everything he went through after what happened in book 2 hit me right in the feels

I didn’t trust myself, Danika. I needed my sobriety. I’m nothing without it, and you were a lovely trigger for me.  That look in your eyes, after all that I’d done…The way you looked at me like I was scum and knowing that I deserved all of your antipathy. I knew that if you looked at me like that again, I’d hit rock bottom, and this time I wouldn’t come back from it.”

I kept waiting for their reunion, knowing that when these two cross paths it will be explosive. And holy shit was it!

The world stopped as we took what we needed, what I’d been starved for since the very last time I’d been in his arms.   It was a frenzied mating, a swift coming together that took me to the fever pitch of ecstasy with a few rough, heavy strokes, over too soon, the perfect testament to our torrid love affair.

I loved the way that Tristan works to get back into Danika’s heart again. You can feel his pain and heartache through the pages. As much as I wanted to hate him after the end of book 2, my heart went out to him. That’s the beauty of a book written in dual first person POVs.

Love doesn’t let you walk away clean. Love is messy. I don’t have to tell you, of all people; Love takes a fucking piece of you before it’s done.”

There was plenty of things stacked against them; their past, the secrets Danika still keeps, and their present. On a side note, Mona…

This was not as angsty as book 2, thankfully, but still packed a hell of a punch.

(Highlight to view spoilers)[When Danika finally reveals everything that happened that night to Tristan and reading his reaction? Gut-wrenching. (hide spoiler)]
(When Danika finally reveals everything that happened that night to Tristan and reading his reaction? Gut-wrenching.)

But then there was that ending. Perfection. Not gonna lie, it brought a tear to my cold and black little heart. It was that good.

Why not 5 stars?
There were some things that I wanted a little more resolution for. I’m a picky bitch, what can I do?
(After everything that happened with Danika and her sister, I wanted to see what happened with their relationship. I don’t remember her being mentioned after that whole Tristan fiasco. I loved that she had her half-brother now, but some resolution with Dahlia would have been great.)[After everything that happened with Danika and her sister, I wanted to see what happened with their relationship. I don’t remember her being mentioned after that whole Tristan fiasco. I loved that she had her half-brother now, but some resolution with Dahlia would have been great. (hide spoiler)]

Aside from that very minor thing, I loved the book. Trilogies are not something I read as I tend to grow bored with the same couple after 2 books. TO be honest, when I saw that there was going to be 3 books instead of the 2 that I had assumed, I almost didn’t read it. (I blame my book ADD) But after reading these books I can definitely understand the necessity of it being stretched into 3. The story would not have been the same in just 2 books. Considering that this is my 2nd trilogy that I finished, it tells you something. If you love angsty, emotional, break-your-heart-then-put-it-back-together-with-a-cherry-on-top love stories, you need to read this.