The Whole Man by C.F. Rose

The Whole Man was a pleasant read about two wounded people trying to get beyond their personal hang-ups to fight through on a second chance at love. Evan O’Cleary and Jesse Walsh had met and had a passionate two-day love affair. Jesse was a rising baseball player just about to make it to the majors when a family tragedy tore him apart and he abruptly abandoned Evan. He still hasn't recovered from that loss. She went on to fall into an abusive relationship from which she has just recently fled back to Southern California. There she encounters Jesse who had abandoned his chance at a major-league career in order to be a high school baseball coach.

Evan and Jesse are still very attracted to each other, but they blow hot and cold with each other. First Jesse doesn’t feel ready for a serious relationship. Then Evan finds out a highly suspicious coincidental connection between Jesse’s father and her mother. So then she isn’t ready for a serious relationship. It gets a bit irritating as each trade off on who is more insecure about getting serious beyond a bit of sex.

There’s a subplot of Evan getting ominous messages from her abusive ex that have her broken down in fear and asking Jesse to come over to her house because she is so scared. Being a good guy, he’s quick to oblige her. Then that plotline is put aside for some of their personal angst and she’ll go from unable to go home alone one night to going a few weeks without needing her own personal bodyguard. It just seems rather convenient how her fears appear and disappear. I thought that whole plotline seemed rather weak. And (SPOILER ALERT) then when her ex shows up, as you know he will, it’s all rather meh as a suspenseful moment.

What I enjoyed the most was the relationship each major character had with their friends and family members. If there are going to be follow-up books about Evan’s and Jesse’s brothers, I’d be interested in reading them.

I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Stripped Bare by Heidi McLaughlin

Stripped Bare is basically a Cinderella story mixed in with some erotica and real pathos. The heroine is Macey who got pregnant at 17 and has had to raise her beloved daughter in terrible circumstances living with her drug addict mother. To make ends meet she works as a waitress by day and stripper at night in a seedy strip bar. Even with the two jobs, she’s barely making ends meet so she decides to travel to Las Vegas where she’s heard that a stripper can make a few thousand dollars in one week. Leaving her daughter with the ever-helpful best friend, she heads off to Sin City.

Needless to say, things don’t go quite as planned and she ends up losing all her money. Because desperation and playing for high stakes in a casino are never are a good mix. She gets noticed by the owner of the casino, Finn, who recognizes her for a girl he had a one-night stand with in high school. He is still irresistibly attracted to her and offers her $30,000 to spend the week with him and be his escort for a few fancy fundraisers. He buys her a new wardrobe and puts her up in his amazing penthouse apartment.

And then they have sex all the time. The book is told with shifting narrations and Finn’s narration is mostly about how he wants to have sex with her in every location in his enormous apartment. While Macey is a bit sarcastic with him, she still can’t help succumbing to his massive sex appeal every time he touches her.

Add in an evil ex of Finn’s, Macey’s adorable 10-year old daughter, a miracle-working security/does everything aide of Finn’s and you have a very readable novel. The author was especially good at portraying the dreary filthiness of the life of a low-class stripper.

There are a couple of twists in the plot that aren’t all that surprising, but I still found myself staying up late to read until the end.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wrecking Ball by P. Dangelico

I really enjoyed Wrecking Ball by P. Dangelico. The plot combines several rather well-worn tropes from the pantheon of romance novels, but I still was interested and involved enough to stay up late finishing the novel. Cam DeSantis is the widow of a man who created a ponzi scheme and defrauded a lot of people out of their earnings. Ever since Bernie Madoff, I’ve seen this trope quite a few times with a woman having to recover from the damage her husband or father had done. I guess it’s a good way to make the heroine have to start over without money or a job or reputation. Because, of course, she got fired from her job as a third-grade teacher and can’t find another job. I rather suspect it wouldn’t be that hard for an experienced teacher to find a new job, but we’re supposed to believe that, even by using her maiden name, people will recognize her anywhere she goes and start yelling her. Does anyone think they could pick Bernie Madoff’s wife or children out of a lineup? I seriously doubt it, but roll with that.

She needs to make money to pay her parents back for emptying their savings to pay for a lawyer to defend her from suspicions of having known about her husband’s fraud. So she ends up taking the job as nanny/home-school teacher to the sad nephew of the New York team’s star quarterback. Poor Sam has been left with his uncle, whom he barely knows, while his mother is in drug rehab. His uncle, Calvin Shaw, is a superstar, Super-Bowl winning quarterback. Think of a Tom Brady type complete with all the health food fetishes.

Of course, he is attracted to his hot nanny. And she’s attracted to him. And she helps to bring the reclusive superstar closer together with his shy nephew. And she gets him to quickly abandon his health food diet.

She ends up agreeing to act as his fake-girlfriend to help protect him from all the groupies. Did I mention that there are a lot of tropes in this novel? These aren’t all, but I don’t want to provide too many spoilers.

What I liked best was that Cam is not quite the typical heroine-in-distress for a romance novel. She’s a spunky New Jersey girl and she doesn’t take any garbage from Calvin even though he’s a multi-millionaire. She has a great relationship with her parents and her best friend.

This is be set up to be the first in a series and I’d definitely read the rest in the series. There were quite a few typos and grammatical mistakes in the review copy, but I’ll assume those will be cleaned up by the time the book is published.

I received a free ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wild Kisses by Skye Jordan

Wild Kisses features a romance between two hard-working and dedicated people who have each suffered in the past. Trace Hutton is a contractor trying to build a business after having served three years hard time for buying a few illegal prescription drugs (which seems like a harsh sentence for a first offender) while taking care of his father who suffers from dementia. He’s renovating a former bar for Avery Hart who has returned to the town of Wildwood after eight years of an unsatisfying marriage to an army soldier. She’s pouring everything into building a bakery and cafe business.

Each of them is working long hours to build up their businesses and have a lot to lose professionally and financially if their gambles on themselves don’t pay off. Avery seems to spend all her time baking innumerable incredible sweets that she’s selling and giving away all over town. I found it hard to believe that she could bake such a variety of goods in the tiny apartment kitchen that is described. She doesn’t just make two or three sweets in an assortment, but makes eight or nine plus a whole other assortment that she sells in a local grocery. I found myself getting distracted by trying to compute how much time it would take to make all those desserts in any one day. No wonder she’s exhausted and day-dreaming about hot sex.

They’re both deeply attracted to each other but worry that the time isn’t right for a romance. Trace worries that he’s not good enough for such a sweetheart as Avery. Avery worries that she’s not experienced enough for such a good-looking player as Trace. Of course, they eventually succumb to their sexual attraction and have some hot sex. And then some more.

There is a sense of threatening doom as we’re told over and over again how thinly stretched the H and h are financially and how everything is riding on Avery being able to make a go of her bakery and for Trace to get some new contracts from people impressed by his work on her building. Throw in a former ex-con who seems shifty and a policeman who has an irrational resentment of both Avery and Trace. I spent the second half of the book waiting for the hammer to fall.

The sense of tension as well as two likable main characters make this a very enjoyable read.

Texas Rose Always by Kay Graykowski

Graykowski always has a light touch with humor and this book, Texas Rose Always, is no exception. She’s made an interesting switch on the whole secret baby plot by introducing a couple, Daisy and Houston who meet up only once a year at the Burning Man Festival. And wouldn’t you know it, but Daisy ended up pregnant and no way to tell Houston since they didn’t exchange real names or cell phone numbers. When they meet up the next year, she hints that she wants something more permanent and he resists her as he does for her her hints for the next several years. And he is adamant that he doesn’t want children. So she keeps silent and finally decides not to return to Burning Man.

And then Daisy, who is really Justus Jacobi, gets the contract in her own business as a landscape architect to pretty up the family ranch where, of course, Houston “Rowdy” Rose is one of the sons. She brings her wonderfully appealing son, Hugh, with her to the ranch where she falls in love with his family and they love her right back. The scenes with her son hanging out with the men no one realizes are really his uncles and grandfather are just so endearing as they swap bits of strange trivia.

Then Rowdy returns and everything becomes clear as to Hugh’s paternity. There are misunderstandings as Rowdy doesn’t react well to not having been informed that he has a son, but it all will eventually reach a HEA.

I found I just couldn’t find too much sympathy for either the H or h. Rowdy’s hangup is that is secretly a great artist but doesn’t want to tell his family because he figures a bunch of ranchers would be fine with his becoming an award-winning winemaker, but wouldn’t love him if they found out that he paints? That’s just not believable, especially when we meet his family who happen to be simply the kindest and most loving people anyone could imagine. It’s not clear where his hangups come from so it’s hard to buy that he could be falling for a woman he meets for one week out of the year and yet he is too much of an emotional coward to even get her phone number. And Justus has hangups because her mother abandoned her and is a selfish witch, but she also had a loving father and stepmother. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell Rowdy/Houston that he has a son. She’d prefer to deny her son a father and relatives simply because she can’t find the courage to tell her lover about her son. If he flipped out and didn’t want anything to do with them, that would be tragic, but at least she’d know. Instead she hooks up with him year after year without telling him.

I enjoyed the book, but I found the behavior of the two lead characters so irritating; I just wanted to shake them. I’d take the son and grandparents any day over those two.

I received a free ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Meet Me Halfway by Kim Carmody

In this second book in Kim Carmody’s Off Field series about players on a fictional New York football team. I really enjoyed the first book, Lexington and 42nd, about a young Australian woman who came to New York to work for the team and ended up falling for the star quarterback. This book, Meet Me Halfway, is about a hot sports journalist, Olivia Callahan, who is shooting a documentary about a young first-round draft pick to the NY football team. She goes to interview Nate Sullivan, the new player as he graduates from college and prepares to play in the NFL.

Olivia and Nate fall for each other while she’s filming the documentary. She’s five years older than he is and a true city gal when he’s never been to the city before. They don’t seem to have much in common and I just couldn’t buy that this sophisticated professional woman was falling for a football player who just graduated college. I’m not a big fan of romances when the woman is several years older than the guy - I guess I’m old-fashioned like that, but I find the five-year gap when the guy is 22 years old. The differences in age when they’re older are not as stark as when a guy is basically just a college kid. Of course, he’s the nicest guy and a serious young man. In fact, he’s more appealing than Olivia who is a bit too driven and seems willing to use Nate both sexually and professionally.

I found a lot of the plot predictable. As soon as they came together halfway through the book, it was clear that her documentary was going to come between them. There is some mystery about a fight that Nate got into when he was a freshman, but it was pretty obvious what the story was behind that story.

I actually enjoyed the glimpses of the two characters of Emma and Will from the first book more than I did the romance between Nate and Olivia. I still enjoy the author and the team and would read another book in the series. This one was just a bit disappointing from the first book.

Thank you to Netgalley for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My Valentine Seduction: Love Comes Later Book 3 by Serenity Woods

This is simply a lovely book. My Valentine Seduction is the third book in Woods’ series, “Love Comes Later,” about three thirty-something friends running a software business in New Zealand and how they found love. This book concerns Teddi who is blind and depressed on New Year’s Eve remembering her former boyfriend who had died four years ago. She ends up talking with Ethan whom she knows online since he plays the game that had made Teddi’s business a fortune. He doesn’t know that she’s one of the heads of the company or that she’s blind. He’s also depressed that New Year’s Eve thinking of his beloved wife who died two years ago leaving him to figure out how to be a good father to their two daughters.

I hadn’t thought I’d enjoy a book about a blind woman, but Woods handles Teddi’s blindness with such insight and care that I wondered if the author knows someone who is blind. Either that or she is overestimating how independently a totally blind person can live. Ethan is a totally real character. He’s a fireman and he’s having trouble coping with his nine-year old daughter who is still full of pain and anger over her mother’s death. He enjoys his late-night conversations with Teddi, but has honest worries about falling for a blind woman and the difficulties that might bring into his already difficult life. And he also isn’t comfortable being with a woman who is so very much richer than he is.

Their romance takes a long time to become a sexual one. Instead they take the time to become really good friends while they get to know each other. That seems so rare in romance books these days. But it also seems much more real than these books where the H and h take one look at each other and immediately fall in lust and love simultaneously. Real relationships don’t begin like that so it’s nice to see a relationship develop from late-night online conversations and to know that Teddi can’t see Ethan so she’s falling for the person he is rather than for his hunky fireman’s body. Of course, they do end up having a very satisfying sexual relationship, but that isn’t what binds them together.

Another thing I appreciated was Ethan’s lingering love for his wife. Too often with the H having had a wife who died, she is painted as someone with lots of flaw without whom he’s much better off. Instead, she seems to have been a wonderful woman and mother and he is lost without her. He also just misses the everyday comfort of being part of a couple. That seems a much more realistic portrayal of a widower’s grief. If anything, the book paints a much less sympathetic picture of Teddi’s former partner who was the twin brother of one the other owners of the company. In her memories, he comes off as a rather selfish, careless man.

I’ve really enjoyed this series. I was given a free review copy in exchange for an honest review, but I would have happily paid to read the book.