Lip Service is part of Susan Mallery’s Lone Star Sisters series, featuring the daughters of Jed Titan, a rich and nasty Texas businessman. I found a few bits in the book to interest me, but on the whole, I was pretty well underwhelmed.

When Skye Titan was a teen she was in love with Mitch Cassidy whose parents were ranchers. Skye and Mitch wanted to marry, but Jed had other plans and told Skye that she had to marry Ray, a much older man who was a friend of his. Skye (who has Daddy and Mommy issues both) agreed even though she still loved Mitch. Hurt and betrayed, Mitch went off to join the Navy where he became a SEAL. Skye’s marriage turned out to be a fairly happy one and she has a daughter, Erin. Mitch lost a leg in Afghanistan.

When the book starts, the now widowed Skye is living with her father and running a foundation she has set up. Jed is planning another marriage for her with T.J. Boone, but this time Skye has grown a tiny bit of a backbone and puts him off. Boone begins to date Skye’s sister Izzy which causes a rift between the sisters (I got a bit confused here), and Izzy’s story will be told in the next book in the series.

Meanwhile, Mitch is back on the ranch feeling like a stranger on his own property, and bearing a forest of chips on both shoulders. The ranch now raises organic beef and free range chickens, and this does not meet with Mitch’s approval even though they are making good money. Also, Mitch has been refusing to do his physical therapy – he’d rather hurt, bleed and sulk. When he meets Skye, they snarl and fight and have angry sex. Then they both leave to brood.

Meanwhile, Jed’s illegitimate son Garth is planning revenge on the whole Titan family. He begins to play some annoying pranks that escalate into serious revenge. He hacks into Skye’s foundation’s computers and makes it look like she is wasting money and cooks the records to get Jed accused of treason. Mitch even gets involved with Garth’s schemes for only a nano-second, but it’s long enough for him and Skye to have a Big Misunderstanding. Finally things skip to a happy ending for Skye and Mitch while we wait for Izzy’s story (she is injured and may go blind if she doesn’t have surgery, and being a Titan she is too stubborn to listen to reason).

Lip Service was very disjointed. There was a recap of Under Her Skin, the first book in the series, and it also sets the stage for Izzy’s story. With all this, Mitch and Skye were pretty well lost, which didn’t bother me too much since they weren’t exactly an interesting couple. Skye was terribly bland and still a doormat to her awful father. He treated and still treats her like dirt, and she gives him respect he doesn’t deserve. Toward the end of the book, he does something so egregiously over the top, that I thought I was reading a Victorian shilling shocker.

Mitch is by far the most interesting character in the book and his scenes with his therapist, Joss, have all the liveliness that is lacking in his scenes with Skye. Joss is tough, takes no nonsense and administers a much-needed butt kicking to Mitch who finally decides to take his therapy seriously. I perked up during these scenes, but alas, there were way too few of them.

I can’t say I enjoyed Lip Service at all. The book was too loose and episodic, and the characters thin and uninteresting. I doubt very much if I will be following the rest of this series.