This volume contains two stories from the With a Kick Collection, Pluck and Play, which I hadn’t read before, and Double Scoop, which I had. The stories stand alone pretty well by themselves, but it was a treat listening to them one after the other.
Curtis and Riley from Pluck and Play were all kinds of adorable and the story, while shorter than Double Scoop, had this added suspense element with the addition of Curtis’s ex who was horrible. Curtis and Riley were just amazing together and seemed to bring the best out of each other.
Re: Double Scoop: I loved Lee, he was amazing. And while I liked Patrick, I wanted to slap him a few times to make him see what was in front of him the whole time. Lee seemed more mature sometimes than Patrick, despite being much younger. Still, they had great chemistry and when they were together it was obvious they were so into each other, even if Patrick was so difficult about it.
I adored seeing other characters from the series that I recognized throughout both stories and how they all rallied to help when Curtis and then Patrick needed them. Their interventions to both get rid of Curtis’s ex and to make Patrick finally do what he needed to do were all kinds of awesome!
Joel Leslie did a fantastic job with all the different voices and accents in this collection. Frankly, I was very impressed (but not surprised) that he could easily go from Curtis deeper British accent to Riley’s American one in the same scene or even more when the rest of the guys were in one scene in Double Scoop, since there were a lot of characters to get straight and he managed to give them all a distinguishable voice. Wow, just wow! I have to make a special mention of Joel singing as Riley, because that was damn brilliant and more than I was expecting!