When Emily Wayborn goes home to visit her mom while on hiatus from her hit TV show, she receives a voicemail from her former best friend, Amber. Though the two were once notorious party girls, they haven't spoken in years. Although the message might sound benign to anyone else, Amber uses a safe word that Emily recognizes, a word they always used to get out of sticky situations during their wild days. And what's more chilling than the voicemail: it turns out that Amber has gone missing.

Determined to track down her friend, Emily follows a chain of clues that lead her to the enigmatic billionaire Reeve Sallis, a hotelier known for his shady dealings and play boy reputation. Now, in order to find Amber, Emily must seduce Reeve to learn his secrets and discover the whereabouts of her friend. But as she finds herself more entangled with him, she finds she's drawn to Reeve for more than just his connection to Amber, despite her growing fear that he may be the enemy. When she's forced to choose where her loyalty lies, how will she decide between saving Amber and saving her heart?

WOW! My first Laurelin Paige book to read and certainly not my last. First Touch consumed my every thought – lucky for me, my children are on holiday break and I had the pleasure of sitting in bed all day in my pjs and devouring this book in one sitting…IT WAS THAT FREAKIN GOOD! Right from the prologue, I knew I would be in for a hell of a ride and I enjoyed every haunting minute! This is romantic suspense at its FINEST.

If I could sum up this book in a couple of words – addictive, spellbinding, sexy, and mysterious – all things that book lovers look for in a good book and First Touch had it ALL!

I want to preface this and say that yes this is a book 1, yes it ends in an OMG moment and YES! I WANT BOOK 2 NOW! I am a patient reader and can read to be continued books so the cliff doesn’t bother me at all but I will say that book 2 – Last Kiss is my most anticipated book of 2016 to date.

So what’s it about?

Emily Wayborn is visiting with her sick mother when she hears the voicemail message left by her best friend Amber. It wouldn’t be anything out of the normal except these girls haven’t seen each other for years and because Amber uses their safe word – a word that Emily knows that down to her core that something bad may have happened to her best friend.

Emily and Amber have a history together starting from their youth. Something as a reader that I did not expect but I enjoyed reading because their shared past put such a huge disconnect in their friendship and it added so many layers into this already mysterious and fascinating story line.

Reeve Sallis is charming, alluring, rich and sexy. He is the last guy to be seen with Amber and Emily wants to get down to what happened to her friend and it all starts with meeting him and embedding herself into his life.

Things don’t go as planned at first but the initial connection and attraction between these two are hard to ignore and what ensues is a passionate and intense love affair that is both hot as hell yet in the back of my mind makes me cautious and suspicious of ulterior motives as I am not certain that Reeve is actually innocent when it comes down to what happened to her best friend.

Readers will get some questions answered while others will come up as we travel this suspenseful journey of Emily and Reeve’s. I want to say this – I love romantic suspense stories because it keeps me on my toes, sitting at the edge of my seat and is just so dangerously intoxicating. Every scene, every written word of First Touch is complete and utter perfection. So much so that I put this book on my Top Reads of 2015 list. Laurelin Paige is a new author to me and I am so happy that I picked up her book. I have been in a reading slump for a while and promised myself that I would try new authors to me in the upcoming year. Ms. Paige has solidified her spot on my definite authors to read list and I am beyond excited to read Last Kiss. In a book world where there are so many books to read, First Touch is a must read for everyone!!! READ IT – I promise you will LOVE IT!

Enjoy a look into Emily and Amber’s relationship below…..

The first time I shared a man with Amber had been on my seventeenth birthday.

She’d been hanging around the neighborhood for the better part of the six months before that, and we’d become friends. We had the same taste in food and music and movies and, unlike the other girls we knew, we both preferred a line of coke to a bowl of weed. “Champagne taste,” Amber would say. “That’s us.”

Though we were both the same age, our lives had been very different. I’d go to school during the day, trying to pretend that my grades were salvageable as she’d watched The Home Shopping Network and ate Cheetos on the neighbor’s couch. Amber had dropped out of high school, and since she’d also runaway from home, no one was pushing her to go while graduation was the one thing my mother demanded of me.

I’d hated everything back then. School. My mother. My neighborhood. My body. Everything but Amber. She’d been fun. Sassy. Sexy. She was electric and electrifying and everything I wanted to be. And she cared for me. Maybe even loved me. If I had gone to a shrink they probably would have said that was why I latched onto her—that I thought of her as the mother mine had never been. I knew how screwed up everything seemed. But who could ever know why a person fell for another? I only knew that I had been dull and dim and that Amber made me less so.

She’d also had things I didn’t. Things that money bought. The clothes she wore were designer, her nails were always done. She’d lowered her panties once to show me her Brazilian. Whenever I’d asked how she paid for things, she’d always answered simply, “My uncle.” Even as we’d grown closer to each other that was all she’d tell me about the mysterious relative.

“For your birthday,” she’d said two days before, “I’ve got a surprise. Plan to spend the weekend with me.”

So that Friday, I slipped out of school early and met Amber at the bus station where she purchased two tickets to Santa Monica. Though I couldn’t get her to give me even a hint as to where we were going or what we were doing, I spent the two-hour bus ride buzzing with excitement. Whatever Amber had in mind, I knew without a doubt that this trip would be the beginning of the next phase of my life. I was ready. I was so ready.

Outside the station in Santa Monica, Amber bummed a smoke off a street musician and I scanned the street, taking in the sights of a place I’d never been. A red convertible parked nearby caught my attention, more specifically, the man leaning against it. He was older, maybe as old as my mother, but attractive. Not because he was all that good looking, exactly—though his body was definitely fit and trim—but because of what he exuded. Confidence. Assurance. Money. He drew my attention, and in the way that a restless, sexually charged young girl often did, I found myself wondering about him. What it would be like to kiss a man like him. What it would feel like to be beneath him. I’d had plenty of sex before. With boys from school. I’d yet to meet one who knew what he was doing, and though I would never have admitted it out loud, I was dying for it, thoughts of it never far from my mind.

When Amber followed the line of my sight, she dropped her cigarette with a squeal and exclaimed, “There he is, Em! Come on.” 

“There who is?” I asked as she tugged me toward the very man I’d been staring at. 

“My uncle!” After throwing her duffle bag into the back seat, she jumped into the man’s arms, wrapping her legs around his waist. Then she proceeded to make out with him like I’d done on more than one occasion with the boys under the bleachers at school. Never out on a public street. Never with a man who had to shave everyday.

When they had finished their display and Amber was back on her feet again, she made introductions. “Rob this is Emily. Em, Rob.”

He may have said something to me. I didn’t really know because I’d been too busy staring at her, my jaw gaping.

“Oh, Emily, he’s not really my uncle,” she told me as she jumped into the passenger seat. “Get in.”

She’d misread the cause of my surprise. I grinned—only one of the many times I’d grin that day—and climbed in the backseat. If Amber hadn’t been the coolest person I’d ever met before that moment, she’d certainly proven herself now.

♥ Read the Series ♥

Book 1 – First Touch

Preorder Book 2 – Last Kiss releasing June 14th