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.