Drop Everything Now by Alessandra Thomas
Series: Picturing Perfect #3
Publish Date: September 12, 2013
275 Pages
Source: Bought
Find It: Goodreads / Amazon / B&N
Andi rushes home from college to Vegas after a serious car wreck leaves her mother severely injured. Unable to stay with her mother and stepfather in their small townhouse, she bunks down in a seedy hotel and meets Ryder Strong – stripper extraordinaire. Liking him – or anyone like him – wasn’t in her plans. Will she let him in enough to change them?
Ryder hasn’t had a single genuine thing in his life since he started stripping, teasing and pleasing for a room full of partying girls – even though what he really wants is a real job and a normal life. Could Andi change his fortune?
Things heat up fast between them, until an ill-informed encounter with a penis pump leaves Ryder’s sexy ass couch-ridden and jobless for more than a week. The only joystick Andi can use is the one on Ryder’s video game controllers. Getting to know Ryder leads to falling in love – and Andi realizes she might actually like being in Vegas for the first time in her life. But her languishing grades back in Philly and her mother’s rapidly improving health tell her it’s time to go.
When life takes the scariest turn imaginable, can these two turn it into a happy ending – for both of them? (from Goodreads)
Drop Everything Now by Alessandra Thomas
My Thoughts: If she writes it, I will read it.
I have loved the Picturing Perfect Series SO HARDCORE this past year for its realistic characters with their realistic lives and problems all while being super entertaining and sexy. I love all of the books in the series so much that it almost pains me to say that Drop Everything Now is my favorite of the three, but doggone it, I just couldn’t help falling in love with one Mr. RYDER STRONG.
********************************************************************
Andi is doing well at school in Philadelphia, in school for child life therapy. She isn’t prepared for the call she receives that her mother has been in an awful car accident that leaves her badly injured, and it takes Andi nearly no time to throw some stuff in a bag, drain her bank account on the first ticket to Las Vegas, and get to her mother’s side. What she finds tears her up – her mother is in bad shape and has suffered memory loss – to the point she doesn’t even remember her own husband. She only seems to recognize Andi… Andi realizes that she’ll be staying in Las Vegas for a while because she can’t leave her mother in this shape – with people she doesn’t recognize – even though this means she will be behind in classes. Exhausted and having no clue what she’ll do, she checks herself into the safest inexpensive hotel she can find, hoping to think things through and catch up on some much needed sleep before having to be back at the hospital.
That’s when she sees HIM. This guy. He’s so handsome. He’s also wearing…not a lot of clothes and he’s kind of…tan and shiny? Like he is wearing oil or something? What on earth? But he is so nice to her, helping her get her luggage to her room and speaking kindly to her, things like that. She can’t figure out what it is about him, but he seems oddly ill-suited for whatever job has him dressed that way. Too tired to think much more about it, she collapses on the bed and falls asleep.
Turns out that Ryder – that’s his name – is pretty popular around the hotel (which is also a casino). All of the ladies love him – OF COURSE, because he is so nice-looking – but he doesn’t seem to care about any of that. He genuinely seems to be there just to work, as ridiculously dressed as he is. After going back and forth to the hospital a few times and being stressed-out, Andi enjoys Ryder’s familiar face at the hotel and begins to confide in him over coffee. Realizing that she will need to be staying in Vegas for longer than expected and that the hotel is not in her budget, Ryder thinks he can help her – he asks her to trust him and give him a few hours. True to his word, he finds her a place to stay and a job! What a great guy! But there is a catch: she’ll be working in the hotel/casino along with Ryder, which means she will be wearing a next-to-nothing, ridiculous outfit too. UGH! But she’ll be living in an extended-stay sort of place, which works much better with her budget…and Ryder lives in the same place. (SCORE! she thinks, because by this time Andi is crushing HARD on our friend Ryder.)
Andi begins the incredibly difficult task of trying to remotely keep up with her classes in Philadelphia (kind of like long-distance learning), visit her mother as frequently as possible, work ridiculous hours in a ridiculous outfit making really good money at a casino, and living in the same building with Ryder. Since she has no vehicle, Ryder takes her almost everywhere. Which means that since she works with Ryder and lives near Ryder and rides everywhere with Ryder, these two are spending a whole heckuva lot of time together. And neither one of them mind it one bit.
********************************************************************
Okay, first of all, I’ve already told you that Drop Everything Now is my favorite of Alessandra’s books. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE Picture Perfect and Subject to Change like WHOA but this one has everything the first two did plus it had me laughing out loud over and over. Once again this author has taken these incredibly likable characters, plopped them down into a situation that is perfectly plausible and believable, and this time she threw in plenty of humor.
Andi is such a hard worker and a likable character. I remember her from being in one of the previous books, but not enough that I felt like she was an old friend, and I kind of liked it this way in this story. She is absolutely as far away from her mother as she could probably be, but she makes the most of it – she and her mother are very close, see – they share coffee over the phone and have regular talks, things like that. So when Andi gets the devastating call that her mother may not be okay, her world is TURNED UPSIDE DOWN and she doesn’t think twice about dropping her budget and getting to her bedside. Andi doesn’t really think about what this could do to her plans for graduation or plans afterward because she just needs to get to her mother. This is both a good thing and an impulsive thing, which describes Andi really well.
Once out in Vegas, Andi has a tendency to panic a bit. She’s there now – SO WHAT WILL SHE DO? Lucky for her, she just happens to run into this really nice guy that actually wants to help her. Ryder isn’t a scumbag looking to get lucky, although I might have wondered about him had I seen him wearing that crazy work outfit! He notices her anxiety and stress right away and he stays calm in order to help her take one step at a time throughout her decision-making. He offers her help, but he never forces himself on her – he always allows her to accept his offer before moving forward. And Ryder is kind to every person he meets, whether it is other staff around the hotel, other people that are staying there, or the often-eccentric people that frequent the casino. Andi notices all of these things and while her mother remains at the forefront of her mind, Ryder begins to take up residence there as well – especially when he finds her a job and a place to stay on a more-permanent basis that fits into her budget. I think at that point, he goes from mad-crush to dude-you’re-my-hero-and-you’re-also-so-hot, so PLEASE CAN WE BE FRIENDS OR WHATEVER YOU WANT, M’KAY? (Insert Selena Gomez singing Come & Get It, Na-Na-Na-Na…)
Ryder is one of my favorite book boyfriends ever. I’ve already told you that I like him because he is a nice guy, but I think he is kind of hilarious too. But I find him cautiously hilarious, you see – he works in the casino doing a job that he doesn’t enjoy because he really needs the money – there are reasons for this – and he also is a stripper. Now, he isn’t proud of being a stripper – it’s humiliating to him, actually, and he hates it – but like I said, he needs the money. He doesn’t want Andi to find out but OH SHE DOES. And I cracked up in that scene. Like, I actually laughed out loud. (…because I realized his name was…) But seriously, afraid that Andi won’t feel the same about him, and having dreams and aspirations for a “real” job, Ryder just wants to stop stripping and stop working at the casino, but there is this ONE BIG THING standing in the way of that.
Eventually Andi’s mother improves enough that she really isn’t needed in Vegas any longer and she can no longer ignore that her grades are slipping enough that she could potentially NOT GRADUATE. Andi needs to go back to Philadelphia. This means leaving behind Vegas and the person in it she has grown to really have these incredibly strong feelings for. There are some tough decisions to be made here: Can Andi live without Ryder? Can Ryder live without Andi? What is it that Ryder has in his life that is keeping him from pursuing his dreams? Is Andi willing to give up her dreams? Will Andi be able to say goodbye to her mother once again and go back to Philadelphia when she is in such a fragile state?
Andi dropped everything before to fly to Vegas and be at her mother’s side, but will she be able to Drop Everything Now to leave?
********************************************************************
Friends, I could not put Drop Everything Now by Alessandra Thomas down. She is instant-read/instant-buy status for me simply for the reasons I have already listed. I love that her new adult books feature some characters that are in college and some that are not in college. I love that they feature people in the ‘new adult’ age bracket that are setting up apartments and homes for the first time because that’s real life, people. I love that these characters are seeking out jobs, often while they are in school, because that’s real life. I love that they have to juggle with balancing budgets, working (sometimes more than one job), classes, relationships, and friendships. And I love that in this particular book, one of life’s ‘unknowns’ or ‘suddenlies’ was thrown in (when Andi’s mom was in an accident) because HEY THIS STUFF HAPPENS TO US and it is great to see how people react.
Alessandra Thomas did not shy away from throwing emotion into her characters in Drop Everything Now. Andi’s emotions were all over the place, just like mine would have been. She didn’t know what to think or where to go or what to do first when she got to Vegas to begin to help her mother heal – speaking as a nurse, that is SO TRUE TO LIFE. BUT! I also love that when she began to find her feet a little bit and decided to stick around some, Andi allowed herself to make a few friends (FANTASTIC secondary characters in here, as I expected from Alessandra Thomas). She allowed herself to laugh and even though she may have tried to fight it for a second, she allowed herself the opportunity to feel wanted and desired and loved on by Ryder. And Ryder had some emotions as well – he had emotions regarding his slowly-developing and complicated-at-times relationship with Andi and he also had some heavy emotions regarding that other thing in his life that kept preventing him from pursuing his dreams.
The romance between Andi and Ryder was nothing short of…well, I just loved it. Give me a slow burn that is swoony and steamy and filled with emotion and good intentions and humor and BOOM, I’m all over it. That is all. And that ending? YES PLEASE. I shall file this book with the other two in the series as re-reads-for-sure.
I am gushing because I loved this book. I am a fan of this author and this series and for all of you that I’ve been pushing it on, if you haven’t read these books yet, I say with love that IT’S YOUR OWN FAULT. Because they’re adding up and you’ll have to play catch up and they just keep getting better and better. And I’m just gonna keep pushing them on you. If you are a fan of REALLY GREAT New Adult Contemporary Romance with some realistic life-stuff in them, freaking grab some Alessandra Thomas. Just do it. Good gracious, you’ll love them.
********************************************************************
Drop Everything Now will appeal to fans of:
New Adult Contemporary Romance
Romance: No triangle. Slow Burn.
(But I was in instalove with Ryder. So what?)
Romance: No triangle. Slow Burn.
(But I was in instalove with Ryder. So what?)
Men named RYDER STRONG
Great Setting: Las Vegas
Drop Everything Now by Alessandra Thomas
is currently available for purchase.
*Mature audiences only – this book is New Adult and contains some scenes
that are inappropriate for younger readers.
********************************************************************
If I’ve suggested this series to you and you haven’t started it,
WHY NOT?
You need to DROP EVERYTHING NOW and get started.
(See what I did there?)
It’s instant-read/instant-buy for me, so if you trust ME,
then THERE YOU GO.
About Asheley
Asheley is a Southern girl. She loves Carolina blue skies, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and NC craft beer. She loves all things history but prefers books over everything.
You can find her somewhere in North Carolina, daydreaming about the ocean.
Find Asheley on Litsy @intothehallofbooks!
"If she writes it, I will read it." I am so sold. Going to turn on my Nook and make sure Book 1 is downloaded for my upcoming trip!
I really need to read these books! I'm well aware of how much you adore this series and this author, and just seeing your thoughts on this latest installment makes me want to go and read to catch up!