The high-powered high life loses all its allure in the face of family tragedy.
A return to the Gulf Coast life and a chance to reconnect and reclaim what really matters leads to unexpected passion and a final chance at true love in this tumultuous summer romance from best-selling author Gerri Hill!
Firstly I would like to say how much I love Gerri Hill’s serious side. Her cop dramas, her crime solving, they’re great stories that happen to feature lesbians who fall in love. The other side of Gerri Hill is the more romantic side; this is a romantic book. It is probably my least favorite book by an author I really like.
Jordan Sims returns home after the death of her brother to help her estranged parents manage their tourist shop now that her brother, the manager, is dead. Annie Thomas works at the store, and is re-starting her life after ending her bad marriage. They meet and become fast friends, as they become closer we realize Annie is pregnant with Jordan’s dead brother’s child. Once the secret is out Annie moves into Pelican’s Landing with Jordan and prepares for the baby. Jordan learns to manage the shop while slowly becoming closer to her parents and Annie.
The dead brother as a plot device is convenient for the story, but I really had to suspend my disbelief for the reactions surrounding his tragic single car accident in a rainstorm. The family seems to mention him intermittently but doesn’t really grieve much. Jordan’s parents are too busy running their restaurant and Jordan only muses that she wished she’d spent more time with him recently. I think there’s one scene where her parents come for dinner, but beyond that Jordan’s father is always at the restaurant. Her mother seems thrilled that her dead son got his employee pregnant (on the night he was killed) and becomes a surrogate mother for Annie during the pregnancy. Annie’s own parents are very one dimensional. Religious, narrow-minded and mean. It’s a miracle that Annie turned out as sweet as she is, a bit naive regarding her sexuality, but a very likeable character.
Jordan is a bit of a mystery. We get a bit of history from her discussing why she and her parents are estranged, it seems odd that being found out gay (when her parent’s didn’t seem to care) managed to keep them apart for so many years. I’m not sure what high profile, powerful job Jordan had that she both kept needing to get back to and wanted to hide from, I suppose it didn’t really matter.
True to Gerri Hill’s standards, the sex was great. It was sexy and sweet and probably the biggest reason I kept reading. On the whole the book started with a lot of strange elements: dead brother, pregnant Annie, Annie’s ex-husband reappearing, Annie’s fundamentalist parents. None of them seemed to surface enough to add much interest and the story was a pretty predictable one. I won’t be re-reading this one anytime soon.
I’d give it 2.5 out of 5 stars.
