Hold Me by Susan Mallery

I have an ARC and I'm hoping that the population listed on page 8 (125,482) is a printing error. How in the world is anything over 10,000 considered "small town?" Hell, even just calling anything over 100,000 "a town" is pushing it. I live in a very small... well, let's call it a town... of under a thousand year-round residents. From the description of Fool's Gold, even in this book (only a few stoplights, one bar - soon to be two, everyone knowing each other, etc.) I've been imagining something around 2-3,000, 5,000 max. Up to this point, I've been ignoring any inconsistencies of small-town living because I haven't noticed any listings of population and the fact that so many of the former books H/Hs have to be wedged into the new books. It's interesting that my major peeve with this series has finally taken a back seat.

>>Reading more, there is both a community college and a 4-year college how is this a small town? Are both just really teeny?

>>Note: after really wondering about this for about half of the Fool's Gold series, and having it bother me to the point that I couldn't keep reading without at least checking the internet, I finally found a note on Wikipedia that the state of California considers "town" and "cities" to be synonymous. Okay, fine. But a good editor would figure out that it means something entirely different outside that state. A quick search on the internet has most folks agreeing that a "small town" is at least less than 10,000 and certainly less than 15,000. If Fool's Gold indeed has over 125,000 people living in it, it is a mid-sized city and there is NO way that "everyone would know everyone else." And there would be more than one bar. We have 3 that are open year-round in my town and 7 during the summer months when we have around 4,000 people in town.
And traffic regulations would sure as hell call for more than "a few" stoplights. The next town up, just over 4,000, has 6 or 7.
I realize that there is such a thing as suspension of disbelief but this done broke my suspension.

>>Okay, on to the rest of the review:
Finally, a story with a former Olympic-worthy athlete and he's NOT bitter about it. As a skier, Kipling Gilmore knew his career was limited and, after a career-ending injury is doing something else with his life instead of moping about it. I'm sure there are other books out there like this but I can't think of any offhand. His major failing is that he likes to fix things for people. Doesn't consider what they want or offer suggestions, he just fixes it. Which. Got. So. Annoying.
Destiny Mills is in Fool's Gold for a short time. She's helping to set up a new Search and Rescue (SAR) computer system. She doesn't like to make forever friends (or lovers). She prefers to swoop in, do her job and get out with a clean break (could that work in today's age of social media? I guess if you just unfriended people as soon as you left.
Her biggest problems are that she is the talented daughter of two country mega-stars and her half-sister has been dumped on her.

I did not like the unexpected pregnancy line. Yes, girls can get pregnant if they're virgins and it can happen only once. That was a nice touch. But it was just too much in an already full book.
I did like that Kipling's problem of getting excited about projects rather than people was addressed. It was getting so blatant and it was nearing the end of the book with nobody talking about it.
Another thing that bothered me- I get that Kipling might not have talked to Jo about opening another bar, but how come none of the other guys did? Or had their wives talk to her? They were nervous about it from the beginning, kept mentioning that the Man Cave might not survive without her support, so why did none of others ask anything?

Follows Fool's Gold #15.5 Yours for Christmas
Followed by Fool's Gold #17 Kiss Me (link will be live June 23, 2015)