My New Year Fling (Love Comes Later, #2) by Serenity Woods

My New Year Fling is the second book in Woods’ series, “Love Comes Later,” which revolves around the billionaire owners of New Zealand’s largest gaming company. They’re good friends, but have suffered the devastating loss of the twin brother of the company’s main programmer, Rich. To top it off, the deceased young man was engaged to the sister of the other owner. And Rich, the identical surviving twin has always been in love with his brother’s fiance. So on top of having a hard time overcoming the death of his twin, he has to fight the guiltt and anger he feels of having been jealous.

It is now Christmas and the fourth anniversary of his brother’s death and Rich has retired to a small beach house in northern New Zealand to get through the hard time by drinking himself into a stupor. But the young woman staying in the beach house next to him, Jess, is there for her own recovery from feelings of inadequacy and sadness. She is recovering from a disastrous love affair and having to face the fact that she’s in her mid 30s and doesn’t have a partner, family, or job.

The book is about these two sad, but decent people meeting and having a short fling over the holidays. She doesn’t know that Rich is a billionaire and he doesn’t know all of her sad secrets. But they find that they can help each other get beyond their pasts and embrace the present and future.

And hot sex between two good-looking people doesn’t hurt either.

There isn’t much plot in this book - it’s all about two unhappy people coming together and finding that they can help each other. And one thing that I really like is that Woods shows why they fall in love instead of just making it the result of irresistible lust as so many romance authors do. She gives us the conversations between them instead of just telling us that they get along. Few romance authors actually do that these days. We are told that they relate to each other, but the author can’t be bothered to come up with a conversation, much less several conversations, to demonstrate why they do.

This was a lovely book. The one complaint I would have had is that everything gets resolved pretty easily and painlessly. Jess worries that she’ll feel uncomfortable in his world of wealth and feel too dependent on him, but then decides not to and that seems enough. However, I couldn’t put the book down, not because I needed to know how it came out - being a romance, we know how it’s going to come out - but because I enjoyed riding along with these two good people finding each other.

I voluntarily reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book