*Book source ~ Gifted

 

Nora Sutherlin is a notorious writer of steamy erotica and she’s trying to get her newest book published with respectable publisher, Royal House Publishing. She wants their best editor, the young and handsome British fuddy duddy Zach Easton, to edit her book, but he wants nothing to do with the purveyor of smut. However, they strike a deal and if he likes her book by the time she’s rewritten it and he’s edited it then he’ll sign her contract. But there’s more going on in both their lives than just a book. Who will be the victor in this butting of heads?

 

This book had been on my TBR since 2012 and while I was intrigued enough to stick it on that shelf there was always something telling me I wouldn’t like it so I kept pushing it further down the list. At the urging of friends who loved it and a gifted copy I decided to give it a go.

 

It started off pretty good. I liked all the characters, the writing was great and there was some mystery and witty dialogue. And then Nora does some shit that I find reprehensible. On top of that, she can’t seem to have a normal conversation. Everything out of her mouth, and I mean everything, is some kind of sexual reference or innuendo and frankly it got so incredibly tedious I wanted to just slap some duct tape over her mouth for the rest of the book. Or maybe sew her lips shut since she loves pain so damn much.

 

I started out hating Søren and liking everyone else, but by the end of the book Søren was the only true-to-himself character and everyone else were just fucked up liars. I would never be friends with Søren, but at least he was honest. Oh, and don’t get me started on the “twist” to Nora’s story. Can I just say how moronic it was and leave it at that? I rolled my eyes so hard I thought they would fall out of my head, roll across the floor and the cats would bat them around for fun. I’m done. Do I need to say I will not be continuing with this series? I’m so disillusioned I’m not even sure I want to try anything else by this new-to-me author.

 

Since Goodreads keeps putting this book on my recommendations list, I figure I'll go on and post my review since, as it turns out, I did like this one! I gave it a B+, so we'll call it 4.5 stars. Here's what I had to say about the book at AAR:Broken record time: Harlequin Presents are my guilty little romance reading pleasures. The independent woman in me feels a twinge of guilt over my fondness for alpha men rescuing damsels in distress and whisking them away to a glamourous life, and The Man She Loves to Hate is probably the best HP I've read in quite a while. Since it's from the HP Extra line, the characters seem a bit more modern and the alpha male/less dominant female dynamic definitely gets played with a bit, and in this author's hands, it really does work.Back in her hometown in New Zealand, Jolie Tanner has a heck of terrible legacy to contend with. Her mother had a long-running affair with the local business tycoon, who has recently died. The affair came to light when Jolie was a child, and the ensuing scandal caused her to lose friends and face the mockery of townspeople for years to come. Jolie now makes her living as an artist in Christchurch, but when she comes home to see her mother, she also struggles with a lot of her old demons, and at the beginning of the book, she spends a fair amount of time trapped with one of them.This is a partial review, and you can find the complete text here: http://likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=8579

So. That was pretty good.

Loved this! The plot is similar to Linda Howard's After the Night, but the hero here is a much better person, seems to genuinely care for the heroine and stands up to his family and the heroine does a better job standing up for herself. Since it's short (an HP) it also seemed to have tighter editing than ATN, in my opinion. I liked the mountain setting most of the book has and the way the heroine's art is used to express her feelings. This is probably in my top 2 or 3 short romances I've read this year.

I liked this book but it wasn't very realistic. Cole and Jolie had hated each other for 10 years and than after 1 day they start falling in love and in the next moment Cole is ready to leave his family, his company everything behind for her. It was a little sudden, but the storyline was really nice. And I enjoyed reading this story.